Our Collapsing Civilization

[Friday]

founder found dead in home, throat cut

slip of paper left on top of body "one star"

[Blossom]

[zaratustra]

Well, this story just keeps getting more interesting.

Snopes: Peeple may be entirely a hoax. Or even some sort of scam.

Apparently it was a promotion for a reality show. That sentence can be read in more than one way.

[Grath]

Gun control comic

To be fair, for once, if one of the victims had a gun they very well could have made a difference, there was an army veteran who physically blocked the shooter from entering a classroom and got shot 7 times (survived, stable, awake - not dead or dying) and I'd be willing to bet that if he was armed he could have stopped the shooter.

That said, most of the time it's like that thing earlier this week in Texas where a dumbass with a gun shot a carjacking victim in the head trying to prevent the carjacking (and missing the people doing the carjacking.)

[Romosome]

Jeb Bush defends his "stuff happens" comments using a metaphor about wanting to pass laws to put fences around pools just because a child drowns, which is a law he actually signed

[Mongrel]

A friend of mine has commented that he's starting to suspect that Jeb doesn't even want to be president. Even if my friend's dead wrong, I think he could be forgiven for thinking so.

[Lyrai]

I'd like to take this moment to say that I live five minutes from - fuck, I graduated from - the college that got shot up.

"Shook up" doesn't even begin to describe the atmosphere around here. We're west bumblefuck, nowhere. This sort of shit just isn't fathomable happening here.

[Thad]

Aw hell, sorry to hear it.

Positive thoughts to you and yours.

[Romosome]

I don't know whether it will help or not to say that when this happened in Seal Beach I went pretty much from shock to depression to forgetting it ever happened

[Lyrai]

The president's visiting us. Got to see some Marine planes & helis today on the way home, presumably scouting the area. Should be neat, if completely skullfucking traffic.

If he gives a speech at the college I might try and go see him.

[Mongrel]

Recent studies show that by 2100 some areas of the Mideast could see summer temps of 70C

That's 160 for you murricans.

[Mongrel]

So, uh, Paris.

The Eagles of Death Metal might all be dead. Along with as many as 200 Frenchmen and women, including a lot of kids.

EDIT: Tentatively there's comments on the band's Facebook page relayed from - ostensibly - the drummer, saying everyone on stage got away safely.

EDIT2: I feel like I should probably explain my weird focus on the band more.

It being an Eagles of Death Metal show makes it weirdly close to home. While I never got to go to one of their shows, they were a "thing" back in the days when I was involved in the moped gang crowd, since they really fit the very silly, tongue-in-cheek tone of what moped gangs were all about. There were always a lot of young kids in that crowd and there were a lot of young kids killed tonight.



As a separate topic, early reports seems to show the French security forces were in an absolutely awful position, in that the only purpose of taking hostages was to kill them at leisure and not to bother with archaic niceties like demands, so it appears the French police had to storm in without much, if any, preparation. This was almost certainly the intended result, and the attackers just started bombing the crowd in an response to the police assault.

It's also starting to be confirmed that at least six or seven separate locations were hit.

That's a lot.

[Bal]

Live update ticker from BBC News. Militants believed dead, many used suicide belts or vests, some acts of heroism, and a lot of dead civilians.

[Mongrel]

Smithsonian: A Lesson In Hate: How an Egyptian student came to study 1950s America and left determined to wage holy war

Before Sayyid Qutb became a leading theorist of violent jihad, he was a little-known Egyptian writer sojourning in the United States, where he attended a small teachers college on the Great Plains. Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence. Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: “The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”

Such grumbling by an unhappy crank would be almost comical but for one fact: a direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri. From them, the line continues to another quietly seething Egyptian sojourning in the United States—the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Qutb’s gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center: Why do they hate us?

The lesson, as always, is never trust the guy with the Hitler mustache:

[nosimpleway]

I've been to Greely, and if it was my only impression of the country I'd hate America too.

[Thad]

It doesn't really do a fuck of a lot to support its thesis that Qutb was a major influence over bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. The "decadent West" narrative (and its close cousin, the reductive "they hate us for our freedom" soundbite) is convenient, and makes for good propaganda (on both sides), but al Qaeda actually spends rather a lot of time talking about economics and foreign policy.

[Mongrel]

It's an anecdote about a particular formative experience of a significant historical figure in the modern Middle East, not a full biography or some hamfisted attempt at a single explanation of Islamic extremism. It's not trying to prove the thesis that Qutb's work led to and radical Islam any more than an article about Bin Laden's time at the Al-Thager Model School or with the Mujahideen is trying to prove the thesis that Al-Qaeda led to ISIS.

If you have never heard of Qutb before, then, sure maybe this will seem like an attempted biography that glosses over massive sections of his life, but if you want to read more seriously about Qutb's life, or the debate over how significant Qutb's influence was on the formation of modern Islamist extremist movements (he certainly had some, the main argument is how much), there are way better resources available for that.

Also, the title is of course florid clickbait, so that probably colours things.

[Thad]

Such grumbling by an unhappy crank would be almost comical but for one fact: a direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri. From them, the line continues to another quietly seething Egyptian sojourning in the United States—the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Qutb’s gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center: Why do they hate us?

Sounds like a fucking thesis statement to me.

[Mongrel]

It's perfectly ok to just admit you'd never heard of the guy before.

:thad:

[Blossom]