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Al-Qaeda Calls For the Execution Of Bill Gates and Others To 'Damage the US Economy' (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Al-Qaeda's official online propaganda magazine, Inspire, contains a montage of violent images -- things like guns and blood -- next to an image of Bill Gates. The terrorist group is urging its followers to murder successful business folks, such as Gates, which is absolutely sickening. The terrorist group says that murdering high ranking people can damage the U.S. economy.
...to murder influential people to advance your socio-economic agenda. Right? What was that passage again?
They've been spewing this bullshit for decades. This isn't news. Let's not give these fuckers the attention they desire. I guarantee that the terrorists are burning in Hell, where they belong. Fuck Al-Qaeda and fuck ISIL.
Obviously I wish no ill will on anyone, but let's be honest, there are a number of "successful" people who's loss would improve the economy.
You eventually reach 0%? Or, maybe you can pick someone you like, and we'll stop culling right before it hits them? That's how people always expect these things to work. Robespierre learned the hard way that it does not.
That's why talking about killing the rich and powerful is absolutely retarded. You'd be the second guy up against the wall.
Al-Qaeda's the Jeb Bush of terrorist orgs. Once respected, they coasted for too long, grew fat and lazy and lost their edge.
Like Jeb Bush, Al-Qaeda has an excellent donor network to fund future activities.
Al-Qaeda killed thousands on 9/11 and is calling for more attacks. ISIL is also carrying out tremendous amounts of violence in the Middle East. Yet anyone who points out that Islam is inherently violent is called a bigot.
However, Christians who refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding are put out of business and have threats made against their lives. Somehow society thinks it's okay to threaten Christians and claim that Christianity isn't a religion of peace.
Why is there a double standard?
Islam is inherently violent. Christianity is inherently peaceful. Christianity says to love your enemy. Islam says to kill Jews and Christians.
But anyone who points out these facts is labeled a bigot.
Instead of blowing up buildings and killing people (which for some sick reason boosts the economy) they would all get jobs as investment bankers and mortgage brokers.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Nope, this has come before, and raising inflation does nothing to the richest top %0.1. In fact, it will make them richer.
It is a long discussion, but go read "Capital in the 21st Century". For a short idea, think about the ways they "park" their assets. Do you think prices of real estate will not appreciate with inflation?
Inflation is mostly harmful for the middle class which cannot invest in efficient assets, but has enough money to lose value.
They come from a "low trust society." Put simply, by default, they do not trust each other. While the US is a high trust society, and by default we do trust each other. This makes things like disaster recovery and business continuity much easier as the people in power do not see it as a threat to their power. In much of the mid-east, it is seen as a threat and is imposable. That is why this tactic would work very well over there. But over hear all it would do is spread around capital, and pass leadership to new and potentially more vibrant leaders willing to take more risks. In short, it may actually stimulate the economy, and piss off the public at large. Talk about unintended consequences!
After 10 years, they went straight back to monarchism under Napoleon, after all the revolutionary Jacobins were dead. Whether that was a good thing or bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader. Code Napoleon was great; losing a generation of men to war was not.
Because if it's not being done by Muslims, we call it something else.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The CPI isn't BS at all. I'm certainly old enough to have seen how prices have varied over the years, and they've barely changed in a couple of decades, in fact many things are quite a bit cheaper. Cars aren't really any more expensive than they were 20 years ago (you get a lot more car now for $20k than you did back then), gasoline is only a bit more expensive, food is a little more, computers are far, far less, music is cheaper, video games are about the same. Most various knick-knacks are cheaper since they're all made in China now. And it's possible to get a lot of stuff much cheaper than before because of the internet, Ebay, Amazon, etc.
What's really changed is housing costs. They've gone through the roof. So that changes the budget for everything else. The other thing that's changed a lot is healthcare costs (and associated insurance premiums, which are related; ACA helped hold them down a bit, but it did nothing to control the actual cost of care so it keeps rocketing up). These (AFAIK) are not tracked by the CPI because they're not "consumer items", even though most everyone has to pay for them.
Most of this stuff is due to pure ignorance of how America works. Their minds are focused on the idea of a centralized source of power. A supreme leader or a king.
The U.S. in general has power distributed where someone can be valuable however not indispensable. In theory you can kill the CEO's of the fortune 500 and still the U.S. Economy will still run. Their wealth will be transferred to next of kin, their investments will still be moving most companies can keep up to day to day operations for an while before they can replace the loss in leadership.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While I wish no harm upon Bill Gates - in spite of being vehemently anti-Microsoft myself - I don't see what Al-Qaeda could expect to accomplish by killing him. He stepped down how many years ago from the top of Microsoft? This seems about as logical as watching too many reruns of ER and then deciding to kill George Clooney to harm our health care system.
The Gates Foundation funds education, including education for girls.
An educated populous is the greatest threat to a theocracy.
This is what naming Gates is all about.
They did more damage to the US economy by using airplanes to take down the Twin Towers, than the damage done to the Twin Towers. This just proves it was an accident they were successful.
If they wanted to collapse the US economy, they should bomb 5 airports with bombs inside luggage that goes off in the scanner line. All 5 within 1 minute of each other spread around. Then, two weeks later, set off 5 more in the ticketing lines. Then, presuming the response is greater curb-side inspections, wait another few weeks and set off car bombs.
Attacking the security perimeter shows that the idea of a perimeter is the failure, and nobody will ever feel safe again. Random acts of terrorism that attacks the common person will do more. Hijack a pizza delivery guy and deliver a bomb instead. Nobody will order delivery food again, if they fear getting a bomb instead. The terror will cripple the US economy.
Learn to love Alaska
The funny thing is that this is almost a reflection of the West's understanding of how Al Qaeda works. How long did we focus on going after Bin Laden or any of the other top guys, as if taking out those guys is sufficient to wipe out an entire ideology. Likely the mis-targeted drone strikes and other operations undertaken to eliminate these figureheads only served to bring more to the extremist ideology.
The international jihadi movement was fragmented in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but it started to coalesce around two groups in the 90s: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. (Hamas and Hezbollah are mostly specific to a Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, respectively, with a little bit of overlap to neighboring states.) Since then, the movement has been fragmenting again: Boko Haram arose in Nigeria, ISIS in Iraq (out of what was once al-Qaeda in Iraq), and the Taliban have split at least once and maybe twice. Al-Qaeda has tried to reinvent itself, with reports of strategic changes limiting acts against civilians (particularly Muslims) and an attempt to portray themselves as somewhat more gentle than they were, especially in the face of the savagery that ISIS has taken up.
But with all of the attention to al-Qaeda over the years, the leadership really has dwindled, and their ability to adequately train operatives to undertake attacks against Western targets has similarly declined. The group has also proved to be far less adept at social media than is ISIS, limiting their recruiting capability for both front line forces and leadership. Most of their recruits come from areas that don't have strong connections to the outside world, limiting recruitment to more personal means. ISIS is also widely seen as the more effective group, since it's taken territory across large swaths of Iraq and Syria (though word of their losses has not been widely reported in the media and the group isn't keen to play them up), while al-Qaeda's holdings are mostly limited to small parts of Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.
I would not be at all surprised to see that al-Qaeda ultimately outlives ISIS. The former has more experience surviving losses than the latter, which has changed names about a dozen times since forming in the late 1990s as it keeps reinventing itself.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.