Let's just say that a group of folks decided they would randomly bomb market places, shopping centers and office buildings in your city.

How long do you think it would take for the local authorities to Search and Destroy these motherfuckers?

It took us what? 3 weeks to start bombing Assramistan after 9/11?

The militant wings of The Black Panthers and folks like The Symbionese Liberation Army got there's pretty quick, too.

And in places like India, Pakistan, Iraq, or even Israel, it is COMMONPLACE for week long periods of bombings, where the death and injury tolls grow in to the THOUSANDS.

Is this a Western Culture Law and Order thing? A random good side effect of our big-brother survellance society? Why do the normal, every day people who are getting the shit bombed out of them not go bomb the bombers?

If you were over at your homeboy Ahmed's and he was like "I'm about to strap on this here vest o' bombs and walk into the Al-Krumy Market and blow myself and 87 random people to An-Nar" wouldn't you say..try to stop him? Call the cops? Call his parents? SHOOT HIM?!!

(This could be fun)

because we dont really worry about whether we are retaliating against the right bad guy - just a bad guy.

that and nearly unlimited resources.

in philly they'd get shot for a parking spot on their way into the building.

The system works.

Is this seriously not anything anyone's interested in?

And rparis and his terrorist coddling ilk don't count.

Well, y'see, those fuckers would all be sharing the same room in a cheap motel in Montana with credit card receipts tracing them to the nearest Taco Bell. Makes it easier to find 'em, really.

And you might also want to take into account that Osama is still wandering around flipping the bird westward after every prayer to Allah, so it's kind of hard to pretend that our society is any great shakes at hunting down anything.

I think Rodney is partly right. I also think it might have something with our own aversion to extreme adversity. It took years to find Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph, because they were willing to give up reruns of "Step by Step", Arby-Qs and hot showers every morning. Those motherfuckers knew how to hide, and in places like India or Pakistan, I'm sure there are plenty of places to hide if you are willing to rough it.

Not to turn this into a Bush/political argument, but this has to figure into why we haven't found Osama bin Laden yet. It took five years to find Eric Rudolph, and we knew in what state he was likely hiding. He was practically hiding in the back yard, and it still took quite some time to catch him, and that was after someone caught him dumpster diving. I'm not even remotely surprised we can't find someone in the godawful mountainous and quite unfriendly terrain along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

Some of it is social, i.e. the wrong people misusing their power and leadership to encourage behavior, but in general I think that Americans and probably most Europeans are just much more soft than some lesser advantaged people.

I actually had typed my Osama part before seeing Radcliffe's, so mine isn't in reponse to his.

My innernet connection has also gone daffy, so my responses may be intermittent or out of the flow.

nobody asked me.
dude was on my christmas card list.

I think our posts said pretty much the same thing, except yours avoided the smartass buffoonery and so made sense.

In fact, they do. Which is the problem.

As you must know, it is this cycle of retribution, of "bomb the bombers" which keeps the violence perpetuated.... Sunni bombs Shiite and so Shiite bombs Sunni... ad infinitum.

Not to be maudlin, but as Gandhi said "an eye for an eye eventually leaves the whole world blind."

So did the unibomber send you christmas cards back? If you had known it was a christmas card from the unibomber, would you have left it unopened? I would have.

Yeah OK, then why don't they see the real changes made in India or America through Gandhi-style protest, and realize that violence begets more violence, begets more suffering, begets more rage?

I know this is a little more complicated than my initial post, but I just don't understand why its basically standard practice in some parts of the world.

"Ol Ahmed went to get a goat's head for damn ol dinner. Got blowed up. Damn Shame."

The bombees don't go get the bombers because they have the bombs. There are some significant gaps between the Haves and Have-Nots, and the Haves got guns and munitions to keep their stash safe. These also aren't terrifically open societies. A whole bunch of shit can get you executed right there in front of everybody. And don't think your cousin won't rat you out to save his own sorry hide.

It's intimidation. And to a large degree, it works.

Look at the whole cartoon fiasco. By burning embassies, rioting and wreaking havoc, damn near everyone is scared shitless about printing these cartoons. This isn't just locals, it's fucking CNN and other media outlets. Terrified. All because political leaders who hide behind the curtain of religion claimed outrage and offense.

These same leaders commit their own offenses against religion. I may be wrong, but I don't believe Christian churches are allowed in Saudi Arabia. Israel is blacked out in atlases. I don't think Jews—Israelis, especially—are allowed visas to UAE, Saudi Arabia and probably others.

It's not about religious tolerance, it's about making people scared shitless. I agree with Glenn Reynolds' statement, "Tolerance is a two-way street. Those who do not grant it, have no right to demand it."

Well, I think the public Will that let us invade Iraq was vengeance for their planes flying into our tall buildings. It didn't make sense, but the kind of thinking you worry about never does. I think we are not that different from "them." We use violence and blind retribution in our way... technologically, commodity-driven, rationalized and sanitized for media simplification and consumption. Truly, think about it, we are not that different in substance... just in the protocol of our angers.

The conspiracy theorist in me agrees. We prop up bad leaders, hold debt, funding, sanctions, all "soft tools" of extortion to get our way. And, to us its the nature of doing business, but other nations see it as a screw on them. Sometimes it seems we perpetuate the state of confusion in these places to profit from it. I don't believe this is always the case, however, most certainly it has been done.

LooGAR's street teaming "V for Vendetta" and you all fell for it.

I sure to God hope so. He's shown to be far too reasoned and understanding of human behavior to have actually believed the positions he posited in his 2 posts.
Even for playing devil's advocate, it was embarassingly simplistic.

I'm actually, sincerely, perplexed at how seemingly random violence dominates their societies.

Our random violence is shooting sprees and dude like Brandon Nichols -- guys that "ain't goin out wifout takin some folk wit me"

These mutherfuckers blow up people, and themselves, for fun.

I wonder what the death toll in America from car accidents and gun crimes combined is? In a country of 300 million.

And in a "country" like Iraq, 1000s die daily at the hands of people setting off bombs.

I simply can't wrap my brain around it.

religious and nationalistic fanatics. we simply don't have as many here and even our religious nuts don't go around bombing (very often). we have more education, more money, etc. not that complicated really.

The hardest part of it is because you have far too much expectation of rational thought from people who are driven by religious zealotry. Each side KNOWS they're right. And since those other fuckers won't recognize, we'll scare them into either believing or leaving by blowing some stuff (ie, people) up.

There's a reason it's called terrorism.

"But wait," you say. "Blind retribution happens all the time in the hood and in organized crime. Why aren't they blowing themselves up like those dipshits in (as you so elquently called it) Assramistan?"

Here's where the key difference emerges. Terrorism or any violence driven by religious fundamentalism gets a bit of rocket fuel from the belief in martyrdom and that those who die (in whatever fashion) in service of furthering their god's desires for conquest and extermination of nonbelievers will be rewarded in the afterlife. The whole 72 virgins bit.

Gangs, on the other hand, are driven by acquisition of material wealth in this mortal coil, so there's no point in sacrificing yourself if you can't enjoy the fruits of your "labor," as it were. They might believe in God and hope God is looking out for them, but at the end of the day they're doing what they have to to get paid and it doesn't matter if some dude creeping in on his territory believes in the same god or no god at all. If he's keying in on your money, dude's gotta drop. It's all about money and protecting what's theirs. The whole Blood/Crip war is over who controls gang activity and where. The colors just give people teams to root for.

With Ahmed and Hamed, on the other hand, one wants to kill the other strictly for believing in the wrong god, whether one's a righteous guy who's never done anything ill toward someone on the other side or no. Wrong place, wrong time - POW! - "Sorry bro, God says you and these other 12 people with ball bearings where their eyes and brains used to be don't deserve to live and because I took you out I'm living large in the afterlife."

Not that I disagree entirely, but how much of the religious justification is used to hide the real aims, i.e. political and financial power? I think we are too careful to sidestep this as a religious issue rather than an asshole issue. Granted, I'm pretty far removed from any first person account, but from where I sit, a good many of these leaders are probably just as concerned with being devoutly religious as Tony Soprano is concerned with waste management.

Well, yeah. I'm putting A & H a the ground level of things, ie; their the foot soldiers chasing a carrot being dangled in front of them from on high by the crooks @ the top. Religion works just as well as money as a motivating factor when there's not much of an economy to speak of. Quite a bit messier, though, in the end.

Trouble is, if you think that greed and power consolidation is really the root of all this violence, there's a problem with what they're fighting over. What's the total gain of controling the Holy Land? Place is a rocky, mountainous and barren wasteland. They're motivated by the belief that they're entitled to control that land. Not that they'll DO anything with it once they get it (which would be the capitalist way; turn the fucker into a theme park). God wants them to have it. That's justification enough.

But that's how it's sold from the top. It's a hell of a recruiting tool, too, which spins that cycle ever faster.

I had a super long, half coherent essay I edited down to just one paragraph in my last post. The end of it concerned how to really win the hearts and minds of these people and show them the Wizard behind the curtain.

I would be very tempted to cross Dwight Eisenhower and James Carville, and I'm sure you aware of how much I like the government doling out my money. Eisenhower said at some point in time that we should educate, rather than bomb the fuck out of communists. They are real live human beings, most of which are just going with the flow. Show them what we believe in and what we stand for. Most regular people can get behind that.

I saw Carville once support increased funding for public education by basically saying that if we dump a good bit of money in, it may not overhaul the whole system but even in the worst case scenario there are bound to be some kids who come out better off because of it. Of course, he may have been drunk.

But let's kill a few programs or pork barrel projects we don't need around here, and invest in things like infrastructure improvements over there. I'm not too well-versed with the prevalence of modern amenities in the Middle East, so I may expose my ignorance, though you are plenty smart enough to see the point. Let's upgrade and update all their water, sewer and electrical systems. Let's make sure there is plenty of safe drinking water. Let's see what we can to do improve their daily lives, even in simple ways, just because we can.

We earned some friends in Pakistan after we sent medical and monetary aid after an earthquake. But then we go do stupid shit like signing that nuke deal with India, who has refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. How's that for a big FUCK YOU to Pakistan and Iran? These nations may have gobs of oil, but they are still pretty poor. Controlling the Holy Land makes them important. Gets them noticed. But if we can slowly prop them up on their own two legs again, I think we will have a whole lot easier of a time.