jones wrote:

y va marquer wrote:

I didn't say that preventing all such attacks would be possible but there is certainly so much more that can be done to limit the frequency and scale.

And I'm claiming the opposite. I don't think for a second that a couple hundred extra men working in French intelligence agencies would do anything to significantly lower the chances of shit like this happening, and there are lots of studies corroborating this point.

I reject the suggestion that these murderers and potential murderers can be dissuaded from murder simply by France and her allies withdrawing from foreign territories and immediately calling a halt to all milatary intervention.

I never said anything about France withdrawing from anywhere. I'm saying it is way too short sighted and naive to look at this event in isolation.

I also reject the notion that these killers acted as they did on Friday out of some sense of anger at France's involvement in the bombing campaign against ISIS.
I said it in my original post, to me these men are nothing more than common killers, murderers who hate humanity, impotent cowards.
Trying to somehow relieve them of some of the responsibilty for their actions by insinuating they were provoked is abhorrent to me.

I didn't absolve anyone of their responsibility for anything and I would appreciate if you stopped implying that I am. These men are anything but common killers, they were carrying suicide vests meaning none of them even entertained the notion of surviving after killing as many as possible. There are two options of handling this issue, one being to just direct all of our (well-deserved) contempt to the murderers and call for more surveillance, the other is trying to understand how such a catastrophe could happen in the first place.

You could have hundreds of plain clothes cops in every public space and there still would be crimes happening because you'll never be able to catch all criminals before they commit their crime. It makes much more sense to prevent the creation of the criminal in the first place as no motive more often than not means no crime.

In saying that we should prevent the creation of the criminal (mass murderer) you imply that the murderers sprung from circumstances that made their crimes inevitable, therefore to me you are in some way absolving them of responsibility.
Again I never said that all crime can be prevented but I do believe that better intelligence, increased surveillance of persons suspected of being radicalised can help.

The cock up of the French police stopping, questioning and then releasing the man who is now the most wanted man in Europe in the hours that followed Friday's attack points to there being room for massive improvement in policing and intelligence.

mdgoonah41 wrote:

y va marquer wrote:

From the few details released on the first murderer to be identified by the police there is nothing so far to suggest that there was anything in his background that drove him unwillingly, or trance like, to heading off on a Friday evening with explosives strapped to his chest and an automatic weapon in his hands.
If he became radicalised then it was of his own choosing.
It was his choice to accept those beliefs.

There are millions of people born into far worse and far more deprived backgrounds who do not resort to mass murder on a Friday evening.

i have to disagree with this on the large scale.

ive done a lot of research and reading about the human brain, and its a medially accepted fact that changes to the brain (both physical and mental/emotional) can drastically change a person's personality, decision making and sense of being. physical changes (like lesions or tumors) are easier to understand, but "brainwashing" is a very real concept. some people are more predisposed to this, the same way some people are susceptible to addiction and other types of mental illness.

a rational person does not wake up in the morning and decide to slaughter 150 people. these people may have acted calm, based on what ive read, but that further illustrates some level of mental instability if they were calm in the face of inflicting mass carnage on groups of innocent people.

in no way does attributing this and other terrorist attacks to mental instability absolve these people of blame. sick people should be taken care of and kept in situations where they cannot harm others around them.

The mass murderer is an injustice collector who spends a great deal of time feeling resentful about real or imagined rejections and ruminating on past humiliations. He has a paranoid worldview with chronic feelings of social persecution, envy, and grudge holding. He is tormented by beliefs that privileged others are enjoying life’s all-you-can-eat buffet, while he must peer through the window, an outside loner always looking in.

Aggrieved and entitled, he longs for power and revenge to obliterate what he cannot have. Since satisfaction is unobtainable lawfully and realistically, the mass murderer is reduced to violent fantasy and pseudo-power. He creates and enacts an odious screenplay of grandiose and public retribution. Like the child who upends the checkerboard when he does not like the way the game is going, he seeks to destroy others for apparent failures to recognize and meet his needs. Fury, deep despair, and callous selfishness eventually crystalize into fantasies of violent revenge on a scale that will draw attention.
The mass murderer typically expects to die and frequently does in what amounts to a mass homicide-personal suicide. He may kill himself or script matters so that he will be killed by the police.

The frequency of mental disorders in mass murderers is controversial because it is not clear where to draw the line between 'bad' and 'mad'. The paranoia exists on a spectrum of severity. Some clearly do not meet criteria for any mental disorder and often may justify their acts on political or religious grounds. Others have the frank psychotic delusions of schizophrenia. Many perpetrators are in the middle, gray zone where psychiatrists will disagree about the relative contributions of moral failure versus mental affliction."
 Thanks so much Dr. Knoll for clarifying our first question on the demographic and psychological factors that help explain what motivates the mass murderer.

mags wrote:

Short term solutions:  Dry up IS money sources.  Take back the oil wells.   Infiltrate , infiltrate, infiltrate.

Ray wrote:

Ironically it's the US that gave the money, weapons and training in the first place...

http://www.ibtimes.com/isis-weapons-supply-islamic-state-leaders-covet-american-made-military-gear-1873912
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-islamic-state-keeps-up-syrian-oil-flow-despite-us-led-strikes-2014-10?IR=T
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-16/isis-selling-cheap-oil-its-enemies-syrias-government-kurds
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/19/-sp-islamic-state-oil-empire-iraq-isis

In the discussion I'm seeing there's a lot of slippage between mealy-mouthed apologism (distasteful), downright casting of blame at French society (offensive) and talking practically about the origins of the violent ideological sentiments of suicide bombers and also IS's own base of infrastructure and support. 

The article from September that Gurgen linked provided some real insights into the banlieues, but also repeatedly alerts you that poverty and hardship are not uniformly found in the backgrounds of jihadis and foreign fighters. There is more going on. 

Meanwhile, this morning it has been reported that the French government has announced that the Syrian passports found on the bodies of attackers were fake—they had not been hidden among the flux of refugees into Europe. The mutually enablling political dialogue between Islamic State and the xenophobic right in Europe could not be clearer. Each grows based on the influence of the other. 

Regarding "western imperialism"—the accounting of right and wrong aside, to speak with moral authority to an international audience about the deaths of its own civilians, the western world needs to take honest ownership of the civilian casualties its military campaigns inflict overseas, reckoned at over a million Muslims (at a minimum) in different countries in the past two decades.

This is really heartening news: this will save a lot of lives.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/16/g20-barack-obama-and-vladimir-putin-agree-to-syrian-led-transition

I'm not sure how much help it'll be now that Syria is effectively a failed state. The economy lies waste, millions of refugees and internally displaced people etc pp, the damage has been done I fear. At the same time you'd be tempted to say that it can only get better now.

It's definitely a good thing vs a prolonged ground campaign to oust Assad following the imposition of a no fly zone, for example.

y va marquer wrote:

In saying that we should prevent the creation of the criminal (mass murderer) you imply that the murderers sprung from circumstances that made their crimes inevitable, therefore to me you are in some way absolving them of responsibility.

That's your interpretation of my post, nowhere did I say anything about an inevitability of the crime. People in numerous occupational areas, from criminologists to sociologists spend a large part of their lives doing exactly that - again, investigating the reasons people commit crimes like these is not absolving the criminal of anything, and it is infinitely more helpful than just pointing fingers and stopping there.

Again I never said that all crime can be prevented but I do believe that better intelligence, increased surveillance of persons suspected of being radicalised can help.

You can keep believing that or deal with facts:

http://digg.com/2015/why-mass-surveillance-cant-wont-and-never-has-stopped-a-terrorist

The cock up of the French police stopping, questioning and then releasing the man who is now the most wanted man in Europe in the hours that followed Friday's attack points to there being room for massive improvement in policing and intelligence.

It's completely theoretical improvement. What if a man is caught by the police, released afterwards and turns in the world's most wanted man in Europe afterwards? We're getting dangerously close to thoughtcrime policing here.

Far be it from me to question Bruce Schneier, but his article on the possibilities of mass surveillance linked above makes too many absolute claims.

For the same reason techniques of pattern recognition and machine learning allow financial institutions to predict couples divorcing, state surveillance linked with differently collected data could eventually generate useful leads or narrow the scope of investigation for counter-terrorism agencies.

The danger of making a primarily technical argument against mass surveillance is that if the technical hurdles are overcome you've got no argument left.

I stated my personal primary argument against mass surveillance in an earlier post, this was just in response to the claim that state surveillance would somehow make our lives more secure. Even if/when algorithms are so sophisticated in the future that it could lead to useful leads the real problem still lies on the other side of the man-machine interface. The decision to act on the information cannot be left to the computer, at least not for a couple more decades.
And that's already being generous/highly optimistic in that the surveillance would be used for counter terrorism exclusively.

jones wrote:

y va marquer wrote:

In saying that we should prevent the creation of the criminal (mass murderer) you imply that the murderers sprung from circumstances that made their crimes inevitable, therefore to me you are in some way absolving them of responsibility.

That's your interpretation of my post, nowhere did I say anything about an inevitability of the crime. People in numerous occupational areas, from criminologists to sociologists spend a large part of their lives doing exactly that - again, investigating the reasons people commit crimes like these is not absolving the criminal of anything, and it is infinitely more helpful than just pointing fingers and stopping there.

I wasn't pointing fingers and stopping there - I explicitly said that the cause of the crime was as a direct result of the decisions made by the men who committed the crime.
The decisions they made being influenced by their hatred of humanity, lack of empathy, feelings of rage and impotence.
If I understand correctly the suggestion is that we eliminate the reasons these men became like this - we change society so's that a man with the capacity for mass murder no longer feels resentful about imagined rejections, does not dwell on past perceived humiliations,  no longer has a paranoid worldview with feelings of social persecution, envy, and grudge holding. 

Look at the chosen victims of the murderers - a real clue as to the extent that those men hated the way we enjoy our lives, socialive and spend our free time and that there is little that we can change in our societies  to combat the immoral, vengeful, rage filled actions of the self isolating social loner.

Should just send in that road raging angry tattooed Liverpudlian

Burnwinter wrote:

Far be it from me to question Bruce Schneier, but his article on the possibilities of mass surveillance linked above makes too many absolute claims. 

For the same reason techniques of pattern recognition and machine learning allow financial institutions to predict couples divorcing, state surveillance linked with differently collected data could eventually generate useful leads or narrow the scope of investigation for counter-terrorism agencies.

The danger of making a primarily technical argument against mass surveillance is that if the technical hurdles are overcome you've got no argument left.

True.
And also, "improved intelligence" does not equal "repeatedly trying failed methods", and "failed methods" does not mean we need not try to improve them, combine them with others, etc. All the above article does is point at mass mining being inappropriate on it's own to do the entire job of identifying terrorists. That basically says nothing about whether improved intelligence can do a better job at stopping them. And you'd have to assume it could, surely (we've seen enough such cases around the world, many terrorist attacks which were thwarted, cells and chains exposed, etc.).

All that not against what Jones suggests - in fact I see no reason why J's and Y va's suggestions couldn't be combined (or some reasonable interpretation of both: mitigate societal "terrorist green-house" conditions as far as possible; do all you can to stop the ones already rolling), rather than be taken as mutually exclusive.
Edit: see their later posts. Nah, they'll keep fighting it 

I've mentioned it already yuvken but again - my problem with mass surveillance is that I am much, much more likely to become a victim of the state abusing his means than being killed by a terrorist. And in that case improved intelligence makes it only worse, I've gone through a lot of trouble with state authority already with them using comparatively prehistoric technology, back when the political and societal climate was far from the toxic levels it reaches nowadays at times. I'm not going to willingly hand my executioner the noose on top.

There's always something lost, more security at the expense of liberty, more community based goods at the expense of individuals, etc.

In the bottom line circumstances have a lot to say here. It'd be bad, and wrong, to mess with individual rights and well being when all is fairly calm and safe. It'd be bad, but probably right, to limit the individual paradize when circumstances are such that it's either a limited individual sphere and safe, or liberal life in carnage.

The point about likelihood to be abused by state or killed by terrorists - should factor in the gravity of consequeces. State harm would be a limited one (grave only when we think in the peacful atmo of normal life, liberal reality), while terrorist attack consequences are unacceptable on any level. Indeed, such conclusions as suggested above stem from such a probability-gravity calculation.

Changing society to a level where the creation of these terrorists (or even criminals in general) is prevented is just far too complex and even if you want to tackle it, it's a long game. Mass surveillance is a tangible short term tool, I'm not in favour of it but I'm not really going to argue against it either, for one thing I assume it already happens.

I'm factoring in the gravity of consequences yuvken, we're just looking at completely different possible outcomes. I disagree completely with the idea of state harm being limited in its nature and there are loads of examples I could give as for my reason for that. I trust the state as far as I can throw it, both because of personal experience as well as political reasons; Germany's most notable example being (proven) large right wing extremist factions in police, state attorney offices and intelligence agencies actively hindering investigations in the Bosphorus serial murder case.

Just a few days ago it came to light that German intelligence agencies weren't only doing the NSA's job in large scale surveillance but were spying on everyone themselves for more than a decade already, including EU and US citizens, NGOs like Oxfam or the WHO, the FBI and even the fucking Vatican. They were even caught having wired the phone of the foreign minister of France. The same country that did all of this somehow couldn't stop a group of three Nazis who carried out ten murders, two nailbomb attacks and more than a dozen bank robberies during a run of more than 15 years? Regardless of whether it's incompetence or maleficence, handing them even more power doesn't seem like the smartest idea. I'd say even if they had good intentions a group that abuses its means as recklessly as the BND does is more likely to cause damage by accident than actually protecting their citizens.

Yeah I saw a French statement to the effect they'd been fake. Either way to date the story that the attackers were "Syrian refugees" isn't true, although until we know more it might still turn out to be the case.

It seems likely that if IS understands that many Europeans would feel confirmed in their security fears about the migrant crisis if a refugee did turn out to be a terrorist, that's exactly what they will try to achieve.

There's a story circulating on Facebook that an Islamic security guard lost his life intercepting the stadium bomber outside the Stade de France - don't know the veracity.