The New Black posted:

I wasn't commenting on his message. He can just gently caress right off, generally.

Zedsdeadbaby posted:

That ISIS manuscript, moaning at the west for killing muslims?

YF-23 posted:

Sounds to me more like it was pointing out the hypocritical stance of intervening in one thing but not in the other, to show that "the West's" actions have no good intentions behind them. Can't exactly entirely disagree with that but the ISIS being in favour of a US intervention in Syria (even post-facto) is a hilarious mental image.

Leo Showers posted:

This is doing the rounds on my Facebook feed.



It's pretty disappointing to see people who I thought were fairly reasonable transforming into these raving, xenophobic maniacs after the big counter-terror raid went off. Especially sharing this pretty trash propaganda from what I can tell are a bunch of no-name losers. I'm pretty sure I'm on some kind of watchlist for just googling the name.

Leo Showers posted:

SedanChair posted:

Trust Australia to find the very worst in nationalism. That's right; trust in perverse, spiritually barren Underland, trust ultra-merica as a crucible of everything that is hateful and stupid in mankind. You can!

Rent-A-Cop posted:

That's what happens when you fill an entire continent with the biggest losers in Europe and then let all the dog-sized spiders and poisonous dinosaurs kill the ones that aren't quick and mindlessly aggressive.

SedanChair posted:

ultra-merica

Sergg posted:

Bombs solve everything.

More bombs.

My Imaginary GF posted:

The infrastructure required to produce and deliver those bombs creates a civil society in which the needs of most are met while allotted with freedom for choice.

One cannot solve the ISIS problem without regional partners willing to enact the destruction of their state.

Zedsdeadbaby posted:

That ISIS manuscript, moaning at the west for killing muslims?

Mightypeon posted:

effing

blowfish posted:

Speaking of which, how did the "these are the members of our gently caress ISIS (no Iranians though) Coalition" get made? It's not like the Ukraine or random mini-states without an army are able to do more than say "yeah, sure, we would totally help you if we could".

blowfish posted:

Can you please not sound totally awkward when you're trying to swear? gently caress that, we're loveling used to hearing swear words and it's really lovely whenever someone sounds like a poo-poo word filter.

Volkerball posted:

lol. told the truth in his monologue to Allah, and then doubled back when he was talking to the west.

SBJ posted:

This battle is pretty much going to be NCR vs Caesar's Legion

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Germany has some pretty strict censorship laws you know.

SBJ posted:

This battle is pretty much going to be NCR vs Caesar's Legion

Doctor Malaver posted:

I read the discussion from couple of pages ago about how ISIS communicates in a completely different manner... but I still don't understand how they can attract volunteers from the West. Yes, they are efficient, direct, unrelenting, and that can appeal to people tired of corporate PR talk and thinly veiled colonialism. But above all ISIS are medieval torturers, as immoral as their opponents, and they are fighting a hopeless and complicated war. What makes a man from France or Germany drop everything he has to travel to a distant wasteland in hope to cut some journalists' throats before a drone strike kills him? What are his motives? Is he a super-hard-core Muslim who believes he will go to heaven? A teenager with no job and education, angry at the world? A mental case?

dinoputz posted:

I've seen write-ups on idealistic Western ISIS sympathizers that went to volunteer for war, but I haven't seen articles come up where any of those types of men have come back, disillusioned. Can anyone point me to a recent article about a volunteer that didn't like what he saw, or whose vision of a pure jihad differed from the realities on the ground? Or, maybe, would their training thoroughly radicalize those would-be conscience-havers?

Or hell, maybe instead they'd just outright be killed (or exiled? Does exile even exist?) for insubordination for not beheading the "thief" in the town square, who only had one unreliable witness against him who had been 3 large city blocks down, and just so happens to be a member of a rival, shady clan with a bone to pick, whatever...? I could envision that scenario for this group of people, certainly. So what then, no dissenters among these rank and file Western jihadis?

dinoputz posted:

I've seen write-ups on idealistic Western ISIS sympathizers that went to volunteer for war, but I haven't seen articles come up where any of those types of men have come back, disillusioned. Can anyone point me to a recent article about a volunteer that didn't like what he saw, or whose vision of a pure jihad differed from the realities on the ground? Or, maybe, would their training thoroughly radicalize those would-be conscience-havers?

Or hell, maybe instead they'd just outright be killed (or exiled? Does exile even exist?) for insubordination for not beheading the "thief" in the town square, who only had one unreliable witness against him who had been 3 large city blocks down, and just so happens to be a member of a rival, shady clan with a bone to pick, whatever...? I could envision that scenario for this group of people, certainly. So what then, no dissenters among these rank and file Western jihadis?

Volkerball posted:

They feel that the establishment of the caliphate is the purest, greatest accomplishment they could ever hope to achieve in life, and dying in the aims of completing that seems to be something a lot of people dream about. There's networks in every western nation with sort of extremist mosques, which preach this cult-like interpretation of Islam, and recruit for ISIS. So a lot of it is mixed up muslim kids, or mentally ill savage mother fuckers looking for a purpose getting in with a crowd like that, and deciding to hop on a jet.

Svartvit posted:

I'm sure there are, but I'm also pretty sure few will talk about it.

Svartvit posted:

Lol, this is said to be a picture of Houthi leading figure Thaifallah al-Shami sitting in Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar's office (the text is so blurry I can't read). Peter Salisbury says Ali Muhsin has fled to Djibouti. The Houthis have really come out on top.

Doctor Malaver posted:

I read the discussion from couple of pages ago about how ISIS communicates in a completely different manner... but I still don't understand how they can attract volunteers from the West. Yes, they are efficient, direct, unrelenting, and that can appeal to people tired of corporate PR talk and thinly veiled colonialism. But above all ISIS are medieval torturers, as immoral as their opponents, and they are fighting a hopeless and complicated war. What makes a man from France or Germany drop everything he has to travel to a distant wasteland in hope to cut some journalists' throats before a drone strike kills him? What are his motives? Is he a super-hard-core Muslim who believes he will go to heaven? A teenager with no job and education, angry at the world? A mental case?

quote:

These were years when, to the distress of many a young male European,
Europe was at peace. For a young man looking for battle, especially
battle against a poorly armed enemy, the Congo was the place to go. For
a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power.
As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of
Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles
away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you
chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted,
and impose whatever punishments you liked. Ifyou got carried away, the
penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist. A station chief at Manyanga, on the
big rapids, who beat two of his personal servants to death in 1890 was
only fined five hundred francs. What mattered was keeping the ivory
flowing back to Belgium. The more you sent, the more you earned. " Vive
le Congo, there is nothing like it!" one young officer wrote to his family in
1894, "We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here
you are free and not a mere slave of society. . . . Here one is everything!
Warrior, diplomat, trader!! Why not!" For such people, just as for the
humbly born Stanley, the Congo offered a chance for a great rise in status.
Someone fated for a life as a small-town bank clerk or plumber in Europe
could instead become a warlord, ivory merchant, big game hunter, and
possessor of a harem.

[...]

Beneath the eagerly repeated stories of wealth and glory to be found
by young white men in the Congo usually lay something else: the sly hint
that you could leave your bourgeois morality back in Europe. (As we shall
see, this would be the case for Leon Rom.) For Europeans of the day,
colonies all over the world offered a convenient escape. Kipling wrote:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez,
where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments,
an' a man can raise a thirst.

In the Congo the Ten Commandments were practiced even less than
in most colonies. Belgium was small, the Congo was huge, and the white
death rate in the African tropics was still notoriously high. (Authorities
tried hard to keep such figures secret, but before 1895 fully a third of
white Congo state agents died there; some of the others died of the
effects of disease after returning to Europe.) And so in order to find
enough men to staff his far-flung network of river posts in malaria-ridden
territory, Leopold had to recruit not just Belgians like Leon Rom,
but young white men from throughout Europe, attracting them by such
get-rich-quick incentives as the lucrative commission structure for acquiring
ivory. Many who came out to work in the Congo were like the
mercenaries who joined the French Foreign Legion or the fortune hunters
who flocked to the two great gold rushes of the day, in South Africa
and the Klondike. With its opportunities for both combat and riches, to
Europeans the Congo was a gold rush and the Foreign Legion combined.
This first wave of Leopold's agents included many hard-bitten men
fleeing marital troubles, bankruptcy, or alcoholism. A popular song sums
up the mood of the time. One official describes in his memoirs how,
newly arrived in the Congo, he was kept awake all night by drunken
agents singing it endlessly in the bar of his seedy seaport hotel. The first
verse runs:

(There're those who blow up at their families,
Who run up debts, who play the fool in vain,
Who one fine evening are fed up with their girls.
They take off, full ofsorrow, for the Congo. . . .)

nebby posted:

You know, you can think it was a bad idea to go into Iraq, and you can think the current situation with ISIS is an indirect consequence of poor decision making that led to that, and yet also think it's unwise to not respond with force to the fact that a literal terrorist state is forming in the middle east that is well funded, well armed, and has a manifesto calling for the murder of all Americans.

Ardennes posted:

So what is the expectations for the separatists in the south at this point with Houthi control of the capital?

VitalSigns posted:

A terrorist state? That sounds so scary, let's repeat the same actions that led to its creation in the first place! If there's one thing that Dick Cheney has taught us, it's that bombing the Middle East makes America safer.

The only way ISIS is a threat to Americans is if we're dumb enough to give them a bunch of targets by sending half a million soldiers over there again. Stop letting ISIS goad you into doing exactly what they want. Christ, a few dead white people is all it takes to rile America up for another ruinous war.

Ardent Communist posted:

I'm just wondering, I've heard elsewhere that Foley was actually a spy, has that been thoroughly debunked? Mostly from his published history being a bunch of areas where the US would likely need spies to operate. And the same thing for the British guy, with his military experience and then operating in an NGO in all sorts of particular areas.
I don't really give it too much credence, but if they were spies it would make it pretty funny that their deaths resulted in both of their home countries getting involved in a bloodbath. Well, not so funny because it would be many young men dying, but at least an interesting coincident.

blowfish posted:

Who is Mr House?

Grouchio posted:

What will it take to hopefully eliminate every last ISIS member off the face of the Earth?

Ardent Communist posted:

I'm just wondering, I've heard elsewhere that Foley was actually a spy

Jarmak posted:

ISIS's ability to metastasize to a weakened Iraq is likely the result of US bumbling in that country, it's formation is the result of inaction in Syria.

Jarmak posted:

Oh, and take that chicken-hawk shtick that you keep trying to shield your intellectually devoid gently caress-you-dad bullshit from criticism with and kindly shove it up your rear end.