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California Attack Has US Rethinking Strategy On Homegrown Terror (nytimes.com)
JoeyRox writes: The recent terror attack in California reflects "an evolution of the terrorist threat that Mr. Obama and federal officials have long dreaded: homegrown, self-radicalized individuals operating undetected before striking one of many soft targets that can never be fully protected in a country as sprawling as the United States." With this new type of terror risk, authorities may begin relying more heavily on citizens reporting suspicious behavior of others. The attack is also expected to renew the debate over privacy versus security for software encryption. President Obama will be addressing the nation tonight to discuss the attack.
It makes people in American look bad even though they were ISIS supporters. That makes me so happy.
This is just a rehash of the discussions that happened shortly after 9/11 (nevar forget), and the major events I recall from that was the collective assholes of the nation puckered up (really, the nation was nearly sane just prior), and the local Moroccan restaurant got firebombed (because they were obviously evil in trying to feed you).
So after the last wave of security theater, what will be different this time?
Certainly not our foreign policy. Certainly not adopting procedures from countries that do deal with terrorism successfully. Certainly not the need to throw even more money to departments that accomplish next to nothing.
But kiss even more of your civil rights goodbye.
If Obama attempts to label this as a "homegrown" terrorist, it truly conveys that he has NO grip on the situation at all, and is only looking to monopolize on the situation to further his agenda and gain political favors and to further "his legacy". Make no mistake this man was a American born citizen, however his wife was of Saudi Arabia and has just as much to do with the attack as anyone else and was done in collaboration with terrorist contacts he had external to this country. Yes there are domestic elements to it, but to go about it and treat it solely as a "domestic" incident would be stupid.
And don't forget, none of the terror incidents of late has involved strong encryption or even the hint of anybody knowing how to use it--so we have to ban strong encryption because reasons.
Or we could, you know, stop letting people into this country who have backgrounds that correspond to this kind of behavior.
This latest one was little more than a bad weekend in Chicago. Given that Chicago can't be controlled, the belief that a far more diffuse threat can be seriously challenged is the security state looking for a funding rise. Let's just be grateful that they've stayed low tech so far.
Dec 2nd, 2 baddies kill 14 people in CA = CNN says "assault weapons" for 12 straight hours.
Oct 3rd, An AC-130 gunship and crew of 13 rain 211 shells on a hospital in for nearly an hour killing 63 patients and international volunteer doctors = CNN barely mentioned it, and somehow failed to categorize the gunship loaded with 211 shells an "assault weapon"
Why didn't the pres address the nation over this one?
You want to know how to start combatting this? Stop all Islamic immigration, and begin the process of de-Islamizing the US. Yeah, I'm well aware that I will sound extreme to most of you but I've become convinced, looking at the history of Islam, that Islam can NEVER peacefully co-exist with other cultures. All it has ever done is attack its neighbours and it continues to do so today. It will never be tamed or reformed. It can only be stopped.
Wow, Robert Dear, Allen Lawrence Scarsella, Nathan Gustavsson, Daniel Macey, Joseph Backman, and Timothy McVeigh was all Muslim? The things one can learn on the Internet.
Here's a list of all the mass shootings in this country for this year, to date. Oh, and your understanding of history is about as uninformed as anything I have come across. By your standards, the United States must be the Great Satan given the amount of people we have killed during the wars we have been directly and indirectly involved in over the last century.
Please get back to us when you have figured out which other generalized groups to deport. Until that time most of the rest of us will continue to point out how you ARE the problem, not part of the solution.
It was Snowden who actually revealed the problem: the incestuous relationship between several successive US administrations and Saudi Arabia, which is the country that weaponized Islam and keeps the death-cult interpretation of the faith funded:
https://theintercept.com/2014/...
The KSA is the real enemy in the region. Time to get rid of it.
"California Attack Has Some Random Slashdot Poster Rethinking Strategy on Homegrown Terror". There, I fixed that for you.
Not just some random poster. The title is actually from the linked NY Times article, right down to the URL. So there's some serious discussion going on, whether we like what comes out of it or not.
NY Times is not a reputable news source anymore... They have not been anything but a opinion rag for the past 5 years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I see you missed the part about the Moroccan restaurant being firebombed. Somehow that wasn't labeled terrorism.
And so does your victim-blaming narrative fit there too?
Let's not forget that ISIL is a very, very recent development. I wonder if anyone can point to any recent events in that part of the world?
Or do you really want me to believe that for over 200 years Islamic people have had little beef with the US, but over the course of the last 30 have developed a hard-on of epic proportions.
And it was just out of nowhere, and not reactionary to US foreign policy.
Really?
As I said, just a rehash of discussions after 9/11. Thank you for playing your part.
Without knowing the back-story, the Morrocan restaurant firebombing could've been intra-ethnic score-settling for all we know.
Muslims have had a beef with America as long as America has existed. Don't believe for a second that Muslims can't dish it out as good as they take it.
You're being disingenius about ISIL. ISIL is the same shit -- only the flies are different.
The white slave trade (where literally millions of white people were abducted into slavery by Muslims), has been whitewashed out of history. But the Muslims hate America, because America, very early on, ended the white slave trade by force.
American actions may have been counterproductive at times ("moderate" terrorists, *cough* *cough*), but Americans haven't waged war against Islam and Muslims per se; they have, however, fought dictators and extremists (just as they fought the Barbary pirates). If this upsets Muslims, then this reflects poorly on the Muslims, not Americans.
You give these people way too much credit.
"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
- George S. McGovern
Mr. Brown was a strong arm thug that attempted to take a Police Officer's gun and then attacked him in the street.
Even the race baiting US Attorney General couldn't find a way to make it the officer's fault.
Aaron was just a sad, pathetic little shit that couldn't handle the consequences of his actions.
Neither of these two were "future leaders".
After 9/11 the government created DHS to supposedly prevent terror attacks from happening again. As others have discussed, this is nothing more than political theater. Billions of dollars and thousands of bumbling bureaucrats later, we are no safer now than we were then. All it has done is create delays for millions of air passengers every year.
So Obama will predictably call for more of the same. More invasion of privacy, more bureaucrats, more wasted effort. This is what government always does - when an idea doesn't work throw more money at it.
Meanwhile he will double down on more gun control. The problem is that law enforcement is almost always in a reactive role. A crime gets committed and they show up, clean up the mess, and try to find out who is responsible. In the interim, lots of people die. What he doesn't want to admit to is that is citizens are armed then these types of terror attacks would have minimal or no damage. Instead of everyone standing around watching people get shot someone will pull out a piece and shoot the shooter.
Once again, political correctness and party politics get in the way of common sense.
"Robert Dear, Allen Lawrence Scarsella, Nathan Gustavsson, Daniel Macey, Joseph Backman, and Timothy McVeigh"
What organized group did they all belong to other than Crackpot?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Quotation marks = "I'm quoting someone else".
URLs = "Here's where I got this info".
Submission != "Plagiarism".
You're welcome.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
What organized groups have carried out numerous attacks on US soil?
The San Bernardino folks weren't even members of anything.
I reject the notion "gun nuts" are a significant problem, other groups are doing the shootings and they are not firearms hobbyists.
The results of our sociological experiment in the inner cities speaks for itself. Paying women to breed like maggots, with "fathers" who are mere sperm donors who do not raise the child, this is the problem. Adult babies with no responsibility, morals, or respect for life and property are the problem. Leave the gun rights of us civilized people out of it.
The per capita gun ownership rate of my neighborhood is far,far above that of any inner city, but we have zero crime.
When you can't trust your neighbour not to go on a shooting rampage society has already failed. What we need to do is spend money on building up social structure. Street parties, neighbourhood parties, things that bring people together and strengthen the social structure.
Going all "report your neighbour" is going to build up the walls of distrust and lead to more problems.
The relevance is not whether ancient religious texts contain violent and xenophobic edicts, all cultures derived from barbaric times. The relevance is whether current religious people follow those edicts - not some minuscule portion, a significant percentage. This indicates whether a culture has started maturing or not.
To save others the time, the universal reaction to that little experiment was shock and rejection of the barbaric edicts, not nodding and acceptance, whether they were fooled as to the source or not. You forgot that part.
So the proposed solution is: (1) more government supervision, (2) more gun control, and (3) more encryption? This guy was being observed by the government every day because he was working for the government, the shooting took place in one of the most strictly gun controlled states in the nation, and there is no evidence he needed encryption. In addition, the shooter wasn't a "homegrown, self-radicalized individual", he was radicalized abroad by a belief system many people share and spread.
What this reflects is the utter impotence of the current administration to do anything meaningful. Obama promised a restoration of privacy, constitutionality, and a radically different foreign policy, and he has turned out as bad as Bush, if not worse.
Addressing the terror threat will require massive changes in US foreign policy, plus many years of patience for things to calm down. Getting in bed with Middle Eastern despots for oil and cleaning up the messes that European colonialism left across the globe have always been questionable to begin with, but at least there was some economic justification for it. In the 21st century, these policies are just imbecilic.
"They have COMPLETELY forgotten that the Muslims have _ALWAYS_ hated us. They hate us because we're white and Christian. They hate us because they think they should rule the world, and because by merely existing, we stand in their way and we are holding them away from their birthright (i.e. our stuff and our territory)."
Its only a very small section of muslims, blaming all muslims is a generalisation of the worst order. Extremist Christians also want to rule everything so its 50 of one and 50 of the other for all religious megalomaniacs. Its just lucky that there are more sensible christians, different religions and those with no religion to keep the stupid ones in check, but unfortunately the sensible muslims aren't able to control their nut jobs because they'll be killed. Unfortunately because of the religious based rulers/laws in these places, people of different religions and no religion are not allowed to exist because they disrupt the closed thinking and its stops progress to a civil and equal society.
Its not surprising that virtually all the most dangerous countries are strongly religious, christian and muslim.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
true, but as you've said that all muslims want to kill every white christian (what about black christians?), you are guilty of the same paranoid ideas
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Did you know U.S. inteventionist foreign policy began as a reaction to Muslim acts against the U.S.? You've probably heard the opening line of the Marine Corps hymn:
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli...
The Montezuma part makes sense. The U.S. fought several wars with Mexico, so of course the Marines would be involved. But Tripoli? That's way over in Africa. What the hell were U.S. Marines doing there?
Funny you should ask. Way back around 1800 when the U.S. was a freshly minted nation, it ran into a problem. Prior to the revolution, the U.S. was a British colony, and thus fell under the protection of the British navy. When the U.S. gained independence, it lost that protection. The Muslim Barbary States decided to take advantage of the situation and began capturing U.S. merchant ships and holding the crews for ransom. Their thinking was that since these people weren't Muslim, there was no moral problem with kidnapping them and extorting a ransom.
The fledgling U.S. was deeply in debt and had its own domestic problems. The last thing it wanted to do was to meddle with things going on in other countries. But it didn't have a navy which could deal with the situation (it had been decommissioned after the Revolutionary War to save money), and attempts to negotiate a treaty with France to protect U.S. vessels fell through. So for the first few years, the U.S. just paid the ransom. Of course paying kidnappers just encourages them, and it became open season on U.S. flagged vessels. Eventually the payments became exorbitant (over 1/6th of the Federal government's total budget), and the U.S. recommissioned a navy (the USS Constitution on display in Boston was one of these first ships). President Thomas Jefferson (y'know, the guy who wrote famous things like, "We hold these truths to be self evident - that all men are created equal") launched a military operation to Africa to end the kidnappings and free the hostages.
And that is how the U.S. Marines ended up in Tripoli. That is how the permanent U.S. Navy was born. That is how U.S. meddling with foreign nations began. Because a bunch of Muslims decided to take advantage of a fledgling non-Muslim nation which wanted little to nothing to do with what was going on in the Eastern hemisphere, by kidnapping its citizens and extorting a ransom for their safe return. So if you want to play the blame game, the first incident, the precipitating act which began over two centuries of animosity and set the U.S. on a course for meddling with countries halfway around the world, was actually committed by Muslims against the U.S.
This is a situation where Isaac's Asimov's ideas about psychohistory are worth considering. Mass murder is an aberrant, rare behavior and predicting it in an individual or even a modest population is a very questionable thing. But it's quite predictable when you're talking about very large populations.
Obama has proposed letting in 10,000 Syrian refugees -- not "millions". How will that effect your chance of being killed in a mass murder? Will that effect be significant?
Well, let's start with the base rate of mass attacks in the US. For purposes of discussion, lets call a "mass attack" as an attack on at least four people. Just in shootings, there have been 353 mass shooting in the US in 2015, and we're on day 340 of 2015. So it's fair to say that mass attacks are a daily occurrence in America. However spread across the large pool of potential victims, any individual's chance of being killed in a mass attack is very low -- so low that in practice we treat the situation as not urgent enough to do anything about.
Three hundred million is a population large enough to predict with certainty that it contains a substantial number of mass murderers. 10,000 is not. So any fear of letting in ten thousand refugees is based on an implicit belief that there is an extraordinarily high proportion of mass murderers in that population, or that the base rate of mass murders in the US is lower than it is, or both.
Let's examine the belief that a high proportion of Syrian refugees are mass murderers. Now what we know about most terrorists, at least the kind that operate across international lines, tend to be from comfortable or privileged backgrounds -- not refugees. This was the case for Santa Barbara shooter Tashfeen Malik, who like many of the 9/11 hijackers had an comfortable, uneventful upbringing and a university degree in a technical field. Refugees who commit terrorism tend to operate in-country (e.g. Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades) against the immediate source of their displacement. So the idea that a Syrian refugees will commit acts of terror on behalf of ISIS is pretty far-fetched -- if we're talking only 10,000 of them. If we were talking a million of them it's not something we could discount, and if we were talking a hundred million it'd be a virtual certainty, as vanishingly unlikely as any individual taking this path would be.
So what this leaves us with in practical terms is the possibility that an ISIS operative may somehow sneak in amongst the refugees. This is something the Europeans definitely can't rule out. In fact two of the nine November 13 attackers were in the EU on faked Syrian refugee papers. However it's important to note three things: (1) had they not been in the EU their places would be certain to have been taken by indigenous participants; (2) Europe is dealing with far more refugees: 750,000 by some estimates; (3) the US program would only let in people who have been through a two-year long vetting process; in Europe they're just showing up and then have to be characterized after the fact. Even so let's assume one or two terrorists make it in through the program; killing the entire program won't stop ISIS from getting people in through other methods, or radicalizing people who are already here, so keeping those guys out will neither stop ISIS or make a dent in the base rate of mass attacks in the US.
What keeping refugees will do is put ISIS in a more advantageous position. ISIS actually supports the position of people who don't to let Syrian refugees into the US, because that works for them. Remember the famous picture of the dead toddler washed up on the European beach? That saturated the ISIS controlled media in the areas they control, because that's what ISIS wants people leaving their territory to face. Muslims fleeing from ISIS territory demolishes their claim of having established a legitimate new caliphate. It also undermines them in more practical ways -- they've had e
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No, they mostly came from "ordinary" criminal violence, largely gang-related. Shootingtracker.com is a source of noise: there have not been hundreds of mass shootings this year, unless you re-define the term.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If you think 1,000 muslim terrorists in this nation means "we're fucked" then you truly are a pussy. Just because 1 of the suspects in the French attack posed as a refugee doesn't mean you need to run around clutching your pearls and screaming like a bitch about every refugee.
I'm Romanian, I see more muslims in a month than you see in a year, most likely.
They're all fine, I have no problem with them. I buy excellent food from a Syrian store and best sweets from a Lybian store.
On the other hand, my country isn't regarded as "must destroy" by extremists.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)