In Paris, Terrorists Kill 2 More, Take At Least 7 Hostages 490
As reported by The Daily Beast, news on the ongoing terror attack (or attacks) in Paris. Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, who are accused of slaughtering 12 in an attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine, have been cornered by hundreds of security officials close to Charles de Gaulle Airport, north of Paris. Officials say they believe the heavily armed brothers are holding one hostage.
Twenty miles south, in the east of the city, at least one gunman is believed to have taken six hostages at a Jewish store. Police suspect that the third gunman is the same man who shot and killed a policewoman on Thursday morning before escaping in a bulletproof vest. Update: 01/09 17:44 GMT by T : And now all three of the gunmen involved in today's hostage taking are dead.
Watch this space for updates.
Update: 01/09 17:15 GMT by T : CNN's story features a stream of updates (and an autoplaying video ad to beware), as does The Telegraph. Latest news is that brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi have been killed by police, but it's unclear whether the same is true of the third hostage-taker.
Bar fucking barians ... (Score:2, Insightful)
The moderate Muslims need to more loudly denouce this shit.
Or the assumption will be they agree with the acts of barbarity done in the name of their god.
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:4, Informative)
They denounce it all the time. For some reason it almost never gets reported in the press.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
They denounce it all the time. For some reason it almost never gets reported in the press.
BULLSHIT.
Majorities of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan support the death penalty for leaving Islam [washingtonpost.com]
Violence and murder in response to insults and slights against Islam is widely and strongly supported by Muslims.
Period.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's usually half-assed [google.com]. Like here's our local muslim leader
The chairman of the Muslim community in Trondheim deplore terrorism in Paris, but calls while stricter rules for what the media can publish.
(...)
Chilwan believes it is asking for trouble when the media continues to publish images that Charlie Hebdo does.
- This has happened before in Denmark. We know that the consequences are dramatic. Why you should always pour fuel on the fire, ask Chilwan.
Chilwan calls therefore stricter rules in the media for what can be published.
- To adopt a law for this is too strong. But I think the ethical rules of the press must be defined in a better manner, where one agrees some ethical and moral values so that no one feels offended. It would be better for society, says Chilwan.
Lots of victim-blaming for provoking muslims, clear references that terror should be expected, calls for self-censorship and so on. Fuck him. Fuck all muslims that think like him. And they're not extremists and outcasts in the muslim comunity, they're leaders of mainstream organizations. Journalists and most of society just refuses to acknowledge that the "moderate" muslims are actually fringe radicals that don't have much popular support.
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he is correct in noting that the center of mass in muslim ideology shrugs it's shoulders at things like charlie hebdo. you could go to cairo, kartachi, riyadh, etc., and easily find people who blame the cartoonists, if not an outright majority
that matters
yeah, there's liberal muslims who understand free speech, that speech offensive to you doesn't justify murder. but there is simply far too little of them in this world. partly because any liberal muslim who does speak out in muslim lands in favor of progres
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, here's a recent article about a US lawyer who has friends in ISIS and was negotiating with them for the release of a hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig who was ultimately murdered by ISIS. The terms of the proposed hostage release:
Citation:
http://forward.com/articles/211631/stanley-cohens-radical-detour-on-the-way-to-prison/?p=all [forward.com]
So yeah, there are some influential Muslims who speak out, but you know, they can get murdered also for doing so. How many non-Muslim people do you know who will open themselves up to terrorist attack to speak out against injustice?
Courage is in short supply in this world no matter the religious affiliation, ethnic group, skin color, etc.
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(Not that Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi and Abu Qatada are "moderates" though. They favor al Zawahiri of al Queda.)
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/02/pro-al_qaeda_saudi_c.php [longwarjournal.org]
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can point to twelve pretty quickly.
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Well, there's speculation that at least one of the twelve was himself Muslim (based on his name, "Ahmed Merabet"):
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/ahmed-merabet-mourned-charlie-hebdo-paris-attack [theguardian.com]
My point remains: courage is to be found throughout humankind, as is tyranny unfortunately.
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Norway's Christians didn't have to apologise for Anders Breivik, and it's the same for Muslims now.
That's comparing apples and oranges, Breivik for the most part killed Norwegian Christians belonging to a political youth party that he felt was "selling out" the country. Of the list of his 77 victims there's 11 with names I'd generally consider foreign leaving 66 that probably were ethnically Norwegian, from statistics around 80% would be nominally Christians. I say nominally because many belong to the state church without being very religious at all, but they wouldn't have any other religious affiliation. His action was more like the Muslim-on-Muslim slaughter in Pakistan, killing our own "fallen" over ideology.
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Breivik was also arrested and prosecuted by Norwegian Christians, and anyone who would express sympathy or support for him would be denounced and shunned.
Of course there are crazies in the western world as well. Christians who bomb abortion clinics. But these people are a much, much smaller percentage of the populace, and the vast, vast majority of the populace not only condemns their actions, but would speak out against anybody advocating for such violence, and would report to the authorities anyone they suspected of planning violence. And then western (amongst them Christian) authorities would arrest and prosecute them and western (amongst them Christian) juries would convict them.
Islamic terrorism must be stopped. But we in the west can't do it. We're not in the mosques in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and wherever else the terrorists are indoctrinated and radicalized. We're not the terrorists' neighbors and family members. But the muslims who say "we don't support this!" are. It's going on in your mosques, it's going on in your families and your neighborhoods. It's not enough to say "we don't support it." You have to have a collective political will to ferret it out and put a stop to it.
If somebody at my church were inciting people to violence, ya know what I'd do? I'd report it. And the media would shine a big light on the crazy things coming out of that church and people would talk about how awful what they were saying is, and if you were a member of that church people would think you were crazy and push you out of their lives. And if I thought somebody in my community was planning violence, you know what I'd do? I'd call the cops. They'd investigate and arrest the guy for attempted whatever. And we'd splash him on the news and everybody would say how great it was that I turned him in and what a great job the cops did stopping this guy. Because that's our culture.
It isn't enough for the peaceful muslims to say "we don't support this." They need to work to change their culture to actively stop it.
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like this?
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201... [rawstory.com]
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.mediamatters.org/re... [mediamatters.org]
For some reason after a Christian zealot beheaded his roommate in Stillwater, I never heard my pastor denouce that kind of violence perpeuated in Christianity's name.
For some reason every time a Christian kills someone, not only do we not hear christians denouncing it, but we also never hear bigots like demanding that do so.
Re:Bar fucking barians ... (Score:5, Interesting)
All he (and other xtian morons) want is to blame all muslims for the actions of some, but with the option of NOT blaming all christians for the actions of some.
Hence the "Why don't they speak up?" meme.
How many xtians do you hear decrying WBC? None. How about the killings of gay men in Africa by christians? Silent on that too.
Thing is, if you ASK them, they'll decry it, but they don't (And should not) feel the need to keep banging on about how they don't like that. They DO expect (and should not) Muslims to do so, though.
why? (Score:2)
"Watch this space for updates."
If only there were places on the web one could go to watch live streaming coverage of event such as this, or liveblogs. Or a service where small messages containing updates could be broadcast to other users, searchable by special keywords called "hashtags"....
Re:why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:why? (Score:4, Funny)
Second-to-none, as in it's the literally the second option in terms of integrity, with "none" as the better option? :p
Finished in the mean time (Score:5, Informative)
Both brothers are dead and their hostage is freed
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They're dead, Tim (Score:5, Informative)
Reported a few minutes ago, all three terrorists are dead. [cnbc.com]
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And look, they managed to do it without closing Paris down for a day. Maybe Boston could learn something from France about dealing with Muslim terrorists.
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Boston was also able to capture one of their terrorists alive which is much more valuable to intelligence agencies.
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A video about the police assault at Paris :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er7rPjh-Ugs/ [youtube.com]
Looks like it's over (Score:3)
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It is over. They launched an assault on both sites at once, killed all the terrorists and saved all the hostages. Two cops lightly injured, one more seriously. Given the circumstances, I'd say it's a pretty good job.
Why didn't they take them alive? (Score:2)
Those guys have knowledge we needed. Why were they not taken out with some kind of sleep darts instead of lead bullets? Now we'll never know what we could have learned.
Not that they'd know all that much, if dumb enough to kill over a stupid cartoon.
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Seems too risky. Non-lethal weapons aren't always reliable in these types of situations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
If you wanted to hit someone with a "sleep dart" over 100 yards away, such a weapon would most certainly be no different than a bullet at closer range, making it potentially lethal anyways.
Not to mention that these guys were known to be heavily-armed, wore body armor, and had hostages. Better to take them out quickly than risk any more lives.
Re:Why didn't they take them alive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why were they not taken out with some kind of sleep darts instead of lead bullets?
Because "sleep darts" don't work in real life like they do in bad movies. These guys are holding hostages at gunpoint and swearing they're going to go down shooting. The cops didn't want another Sidney, where the crazy Islamist wackadoo had time (it only takes a moment, right?) to kill a hostage before being incapacitated.
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I know! Aren't all cops anesthesiologists who know the exact amount of non-existent anesthetic to administer through their perfectly placed tranq darts such that it will instantly send the bad guys into sleepytimeland without killing them or merely making them drowsy yet obviously threatened and desperate to take action before they're unconscious?
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Ok, so you're about to enter the room against 2 dudes that spent a while in Africa getting trained by battle hardened terrorists. They have body armor and 7.62×39mm rounds that easily pierce most body armor on the planet. Here's your dart gun... GO!
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Actually, the reason to take them alive would be to gather information about their network.
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Actually, the reason to take them alive would be to gather information about their network.
Assuming there is one... Granted assault rifles and bullet proof vests aren't easy to come by (in Europe). This still isn't at a level of sophistication that indicates the support of a larger organization.
One question that is left on my mind is how much did French intelligence know up front; did they know about the assault rifles...
Not that I would expect them to catch every terrorist and stop every crazy person; that is not realistic.
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And tranquilizer darts probably do not work well through bullet proof vests and other similar protections.
Swift Karma (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm with you on the printing press. Kosher food rules are too close to halal food rules, though. If I'd been writing it, the lone loser would've landed in a (pork) barbecue pit, or sprawled under the spilled contents of an overturned hot-dog cart.
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Slow Slashdot (Score:2)
As usual here, by the time they get a story up on the site; the news is over/changed/useless. Hostage takers are already dead. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Please, kill 'em and bury 'em with pigs (Score:2, Informative)
Send a message to their 7th-century brethren:
"You do this, you rot in hell for all eternity."
Wanna be a murderous religious whack job? We'll use that against you.
Maybe - just maybe - doing things like that will drag Islam into the 21st century.
What I'd expect now from the muslim world (Score:5, Insightful)
The LEAST I now expect is for the relevant Muslim leaders to condemn that shit. To declare a fatwa that such behavior is un-Islam and that it is against Islam teachings.
Anything less is at the very least acceptance if not support for this behavior. And that should be enough to discuss forbidding a cult that accepts or supports what we in the western world consider the foundation of being able to live together.
And when we're done with that, let's take a closer look at that Westboro Baptist Church and whether we can get rid of those loonies too while we're at it.
Re: (Score:3)
Like this guy? http://www.npr.org/2014/09/25/... [npr.org]
Or these guys? http://rt.com/uk/184112-britis... [rt.com]
http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com] (and holy shit that's the Saudis)
Or maybe you'd like to say "If only the Muslims would fight ISIS and the fundamentalists!"
I mean, who do you think the YPK is made up of? Or Hezbollah (which, oddly enough is an ally in the fight against ISIS and their ilk)?
The fact is, there are MANY MANY MANY Muslims who are sick of this shit, just like non-Muslims. And they speak out against
The leader of Egypt did, a week ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Egypt's president called for a religious revolution [cnn.com] against extremism.
Now we'll see if others start echoing this...
Know for years (Score:5, Interesting)
isn't it hilarious how MI-5 says these attacks show why they need even more super powers... yet forget the fact they had these guys on watch lists for years. I mean, even Santa checks the list twice, right?
Re:Besides the blantant bloodshed... (Score:5, Informative)
Because nerds are (generally) supportive of nonviolence and tolerance for unpopular ideas to promote intellectual and creative freedom, and these mindless idiot fundamentalist thugs are the enemy of that and will destroy it if they can. Is it clearer now?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Because nerds are (generally) supportive of nonviolence and tolerance for unpopular ideas to promote intellectual and creative freedom, and these mindless idiot fundamentalist thugs are the enemy of that and will destroy it if they can. Is it clearer now?
Looking back upon Slashdot history (you know, back when it was News for Nerds), I'd say it's about as clear as fucking mud.
That line you attempt to draw between relevance (Freedom of Speech issue) and Slashdot is practically anorexic, and I can get my usual OMGWTF News from a million other sites online that are in charge of the OMGWTF reporting.
Wanna talk Slashdot with this? How about MI5's move to become an even Bigger Brother with surveillance laws. THAT would be a relevant sub-topic to discuss here, no
Re: (Score:3)
Because nerds are (generally) supportive of nonviolence and tolerance for unpopular ideas to promote intellectual and creative freedom, and these mindless idiot fundamentalist thugs are the enemy of that and will destroy it if they can. Is it clearer now?
Looking back upon Slashdot history (you know, back when it was News for Nerds), I'd say it's about as clear as fucking mud.
You're forgetting the rest: News for nerds, stuff that matters. This is stuff that matters. As another example Osama Bin Laden Reported Dead, Body In US Hands [slashdot.org] got 1,855 comments, the most for any story I've submitted. Stuff that matters is subjective, but obviously a lot of people thought this mattered.
Re:Besides the blantant bloodshed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot: Hall of Fame [slashdot.org]
Complaining about the irrelevance of stories is a time honored tradition here, along with grammar nazis and tired memes.
Re:Besides the blantant bloodshed... (Score:5, Funny)
That should be grammar Nazis.
Re:Besides the blantant bloodshed... (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot will really be in trouble if Natalie Portman ever goes into politics.
Re:Besides the blantant bloodshed... (Score:5, Funny)
Jeez, I'd really like to meet this Cmdrtaco guy who carried out the strike on Iraq, arrested Saddam Hussein and won the presidency for Obama!
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In summary, look at the Slashdot of yesteryear before claiming relevance today.
I guess you missed my UID.
Re: (Score:2)
> and I can get my usual OMGWTF News from a million other sites online
Please, tell me what other site I can get Slashdot comments from?
Re: (Score:2)
Please, tell me what other site I can get Slashdot comments from?
reddit
*duck*
Re:Besides the blantant bloodshed... (Score:5, Funny)
Looking back upon Slashdot history (you know, back when it was News for Nerds ),
Way back then, it used to be Nudes for Nerds
You must be Nude here . . .
Re: (Score:3)
Slashdot posted 911, so how exactly is this any different? Oh, because most slashdotters are American, it automatically becomes relevant, whereas when it happens to someone else, "how the fuck is this for nerds"? The truth is, big news specifically regarding military and terrorism usually gets a passing article link through Slashdot, and if you're really that hard done by for it, just skip the post.
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Nerds also drive to work in cars, so we should have car news as well. And I don't mean the "self driving Audi A7" type of news, but "Toyota introduces the 2016 Corolla, with redesigned styling and improved economy" type of news.
I mean, we could say "nerds do _____ with ____, thus relevant" for any story really.
Re: (Score:2)
France does not even have true freedom of speech.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't dismiss it as trolling, I've seen numerous anti-Muslim comments receive up-mods these last few days. And speaking of trolling:
Europe maintains their civilization quite well without having to have every citizen feel they have to be armed to the teeth. Even comparing death toll to death toll, what happened in France is less than the amount of people eating lead in an hour in Chicago
Nice anti-American slam you've got there. As if gun control/RKBA has anything at all to do with the issue at hand.
Re:Besides the blantant bloodshed... (Score:5, Funny)
before escaping in a bulletproof vest.
because it's rather impressive that one of the terrorists made a makeshift vehicle using only a bulletproof vest.
Re:Besides the blantant bloodshed... (Score:5, Funny)
whoosh
That's one fast vest!
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whoosh
That's one fast vest!
It must be a hybrid
Re: (Score:2)
Terrorists are trained by the A-team and Mac Guyver.
Well, given the terrorists died - it's more likely they were trained by MacGruber.
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because nerds should be exposed to the outside world, not just the dim of their monitors?
Unless blissful ignorance was part of the reason you are in fact a nerd.
There is a lot of news out there today for the consuming. Sadly, a good portion of it I try and avoid for my own sanity.
I would imagine I'm not alone in my controls to limit the effects of the real world. It's rather horrid in case you hadn't noticed.
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To them, there is no need to be exposed to the outside world. Anything not tech related is worthless is their mantra.
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The violence came from ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... the rejection of being a part of a civilized society
Look, no matter if we are talking about the ancient Jewish texts (the Torah) or the Christian texts (the New Testaments) or the Islamic texts (the Koran) they all contain verses which are really despicable
The difference is that many Moslems today are still preferring to stick with and practice those despicable texts from their Koran, rather than choosing to live like civilized human beings with civilized mindset ; Whilst most of the Jews and the Christians have opted to become civilized
Even among many of those so-called 'moderate Moslems', they too secretly harbor the same sentiment that the Moslems are 'more superior" than the infidels; That the only useful value of the infidels is to become slaves for them, the superior Moslems
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another shining example of diversity and multiculturalism.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually a great example of how NOT to deal with immigration. Or cultural differences altogether.
We're currently seemingly trying our best to ensure that we'll get as many religiously motivated attacks as possible. First, before the whole shit, we ignored them. They were convenient slave laborers, but little more. We let them come into the country and give them the menial jobs that we don't want. We let them toil for pennies and if they as much as complained, we laughed at them, if we not outright ignored t
Re: (Score:3)
Then they fucking exploded.
No, the ones that explode are generally 2nd generation kids that never had an honest job in their life.
Oh it gets better (Score:2, Interesting)
I heard some standard issue left wing apologist halfwit on the radio here this morning in the UK trot out the usual "it was society's fault" rubbish. Yeah, because everyone with a fucking grievance grabs an AK-47 and shoots up a magazine don't they love?
Just what the hell does it take to knock some common sense into these bloody liberals??
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, because everyone with a fucking grievance grabs an AK-47 and shoots up a magazine don't they love?
Just what the hell does it take to knock some common sense into these bloody liberals??
Irony: right-wingers complaining about left-wingers painting them as violent lunatics and then threatening them with violence.
Of course, in the interest of literal correctness, you didn't threaten to shoot them up with an AK-47. So it's grazing irony, not center-of-mass double-tap irony.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, because everyone with a fucking grievance grabs an AK-47 and shoots up a magazine don't they love?
Just what the hell does it take to knock some common sense into these bloody liberals??
Irony: right-wingers complaining about left-wingers painting them as violent lunatics and then threatening them with violence.
Of course, in the interest of literal correctness, you didn't threaten to shoot them up with an AK-47. So it's grazing irony, not center-of-mass double-tap irony.
Yeah, the AK-47 is a communist gun and it yet has become one of the most popular firearms of the American right wing. At the last count 2nd. amendment loving American civilians were buying as many AK47s as the Russian military and police combined. Irony abounds....
Re: (Score:3)
No, "irony" is a pretentious sounding lefty doing his best to sound intellectually superior to other people while simultaneously failing to recognize the perfectly reasonable use of a common idiom. The "knock" in this case is the attack by Islamists on a paragon of lefty publishing.
Blah blah blah lefty, blah blah Liberal blah blah
Seriously you neocons fucked up big time, putting us into the longest wars in US history. Winning hearts and minds?" Seriously? These people hate us, and you neocon crypto-fascists were just telling yourselves your mutual masturbation tales of winning hearts and minds while your companies were sucking off the public teat, the largest wellfare project ever made. All the time, blaming every problem on the mythical liberals.
My kind of war would last about 2
Re:The religion of peace (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The religion of peace (Score:5, Insightful)
This was the deadliest massacre in Europe since the mass shootings in Norway in 2011.
You know, the ones by a Christian extremist, from the religion of peace and tolerance.
Queue up people claiming that he was just fucked in the head, not Christian, but don't understand the same argument applies to the fuck-ups in France.
Re:The religion of peace (Score:5, Informative)
More from the religion of peace and tolerance.
Queue up people bringing up the Holy Crusades and other things that took place a good 300 years ago
You have selective memory, why bring up the crusades when all one has to do is bring up the Bosnian war and the Kosovo wars. There were a whole lot of people involved in the Pogroms against the Bosnian moslems who claimed they were doing it among other things to defend Christianity.
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Ghaddafi would have still oppressed his people if he were Christian, Assad would be no less cruel if he were atheist or christian; neither of those is the reason for his cruelty.
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"Assad would be no less cruel if he were atheist or christian"
Religion does not factor into Assad's cruelty - he's a DENTIST!
Re:The religion of peace (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, if it's actually funny, we'll laugh along. I live in the Bible Belt, and no one I knows is offended by God telling King Arthur to stop grovelling. "It's like those miserable psalms. They're so depressing. Now knock it off." It's hilarious. Imagine Mohammed saying something like that on Arab TV. People would die, and not the laughing sort.
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Slashdot has been posting political stories that have nothing to do with technology for well over a decade. Also the "news for nerds" subtitle was long since removed from the title of the site.
Re:Not Click Bait (Score:5, Insightful)
This is directly related to a story about people who want to censor certain information.
Freedom of speech is as important to geeks as it is to journalists. We design, build and maintain the code and the hardware that journalists use to put out the stories to the public. Back in the print days most people didn't give a crap about what was printed in one country, or even in the next town over. Now we, the computer nerds of the world, have enabled a huge revolution in communication that is affecting entire countries, societies and religions. And we keep creating new ways to share information every day. Control of information, censorship, freedom of speech and the press are hugely intertwined with our nerd lives and livelihoods.
Remember when anti-free-speech advocates tried to censor music lyrics? I do. Remember when they tried to ban many video games? I do. Remember wen they started shooting people who published satirical cartoons? Computer nerds like us are all about moving bits of information around. We thrive on information, data and ideas. It's what we're all about. And these shootings are a direct result of people trying to restrict the free exchange of ideas, which is the foundation of modern society.
Any computer nerd, in fact anyone who appreciates their modern life, should want to know about anyone who is threatening the free flow of information.
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And look who clicked.
The only thing more pathetic than clickbait are the fucktards who immediately turn up to shout "Clickbait!"
At any rate, this is a serious issue because these sorts of terrorists takes inevitably lead to governments making laws and policies that adversely affect our liberties.
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Care to quote anyone who has ever said that gun control prevents ever single instance of gun violence? I've never heard a single gun-control advocate make such a statement. On the other hand, the US has over 10 times the rate of murders per capita from guns as France.
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France: 3.01 gun deaths per 100,000
USA: 10.3 gun deaths per 100,000
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
So according to you, if their gun laws weren't so restrictive they could have had over three times as many deaths!
And before you flip out and call me a "gun grabber" I happen to own about 8 guns. Which admittedly is a ridiculous amount. Though I have grabbed them on occasion.
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US gun death statistics include high-gun-crime, high-minority, areas where guns are as illegal as the city can make them. These areas skew the statistics, and France doesn't have many of them.
If the areas with the gun rights in the USA also had the gun crime you might have had a better point.
Re:Restrictive Gun laws (Score:4, Insightful)
You sure about that? A few minutes with Google implies that Texas has more gun deaths per capita than New York, which seems to completely contradict your point. Actually, I see more pro-gun states in the top 10 than anti-gun states.
Actually, the strongest indicator (in my completely unscientific glance) is poverty, not gun laws. But hey, you can keep on blaming minorities, cities, and gun-control. And I suspect you will.
Kevin
Re:Restrictive Gun laws (Score:5, Informative)
Meh, everyone is aware that there are illegal guns, they're used in bank robberies and jewelry store heists and such. But for the average petty thief, robber or burglar they're not worth the cost/risk and apart from hunters during hunting season the risk of running into an armed person is basically zero. And the ones who go postal tend to stab the first one or two persons to death before they can get away, they don't rack up 10+ deaths with a gun. And yes there are less accidental lethal stabbings than gun accidents.
Unless I'm mistaken there were already two "friendly" guns here, the lifeguard and the police officer shot in the street. It doesn't do much against people in body armor with rifles who have the choice of venue and timing, element of surprise and will kill mercilessly. There'll always be soft targets, you can't protect everyone, all the time against an armed assault. Following the "everyone has guns brings peace" should mean there was hardly any gang violence at all, since the other side has guns too you wouldn't attack them right? Right? Doesn't work that way.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Go out, and spread the religion by any peaceful means necessary. If your friend won't accept Allah, peacefully flog him in the streets. If someone insults Allah, peacefully remove his head. If a group refuses to convert to Islam, very peacefully bring your guns and bombs and peacefully kill as many of them as you can. If possible, obtain a peaceful nuclear weapon, and detonate it peacefully in their cities. They will be at peace. We bring them PEACE in the name of Allah!
Re: (Score:3)
The Last Temptation, on the other hand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Nonsense: (Score:2, Insightful)
"Conservatives did try to murder the NEA over that!"
Trying to shut a government agency is attempted murder?
So, does that mean trying to shut down a corporation is attempted murder as well?
(Note, I don't want the NEA shut down, but equating it to murdering a person is ridiculous.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Conservatives did try to murder the NEA [arts.gov] over that!
Actually, I believe they tried to stop the government from forcing people to pay for having such art made. Some people saw the creation of Piss Christ as being outside the role of the federal government. Crazy, I know.
Re: (Score:3)
Religion and Peace are like polar opposites when you look at the grand picture throughout history.
Do you have a reading comprehension issue? We are talking about ISLAM, not other religions which do not go around killing people for being offended.
Re:Time to leave the muslim faith. (Score:5, Insightful)
Christianity is not much better, if you actually read the bible. Thankfully most churches ignore the parts of the bible that promote exactly the same actions that we criticize "radical Muslims" for... but then again, most Muslims also ignore those parts of the Koran. The difference is that there seem to be fewer "radical Christians" that interpret the bible literally, otherwise we'd be getting it from both sides.
However, if there were more radical Christians, maybe people would realize that Islam isn't the issue... it's religion as a whole that's the problem.
Check out Deuteronomy 20 some day, before you reply.
Re: (Score:3)
There are plenty of radical Christians who interpret the bible literally, including the nasty parts. There are just fewer (by no means none) who care to die for their convictions.
Christianity is older than Islam. It had some pretty nasty times, then it mellowed. It seems to be getting more violent again though.
Re: (Score:3)
That's actually not good news. They were much more valuable alive.
Re:obamas fault (Score:5, Informative)
Nice try.
But when taken in context of the entire speech, its not what you try to twist it into.
The speech was condemning all of the hatred and bigotry.
The relevent section of the speech:
It is time to leave the call of violence and the politics of division behind. On so many issues, we face a choice between the promise of the future, or the prisons of the past. And we cannot afford to get it wrong. We must seize this moment. And America stands ready to work with all who are willing to embrace a better future.
The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt — it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted, "Muslims, Christians, we are one." The future must not belong to those who bully women — it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons.
The future must not belong to those corrupt few who steal a country's resources — it must be won by the students and entrepreneurs, the workers and business owners who seek a broader prosperity for all people. Those are the women and men that America stands with; theirs is the vision we will support.
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.
Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims and Shiite pilgrims. It's time to heed the words of Gandhi: "Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit." Together, we must work towards a world where we are strengthened by our differences, and not defined by them. That is what America embodies, that's the vision we will support.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-... [whitehouse.gov]