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9652. judithathome - 10/30/2014 10:59:29 PM Or...millions of dollars, enough votes to sway things their way.
We no longer have a Democracy...our government is open to the highest bidder. 9653. alIstaIrcOnnOr - 10/31/2014 10:55:06 AM The Mote - International I'm sure there are legitimate good ideas brought to the table by them.
Sure. Absolutely. But come on, follow the money... Lobbyists are not paid to promote the public good; they are paid to promote private interests.
In the EU, the Commission has official consultation committees. No more than 50 of the members may be paid lobbyists. The Commission complains that there are not enough qualified civil-society candidates to make up the numbers; so generally some extra lobbyists sign up as "private citizens".
Part of this is the fact that civil-society groups are mostly organised on a national, not European, basis. But part of it is that it suits the bureaucracy very well to work with industry groups... Often opening up revolving-door opportunities when they get tired of public service and go to work for their good friends in industry.9654. iiibbb - 10/31/2014 2:43:22 PM I disagree. Not all corporations are evil.
The issue isn't them, it's tainted politicians.
But they shouldn't vote or pretend to vote. Then again, we shouldn't pretend that they won't get to the politicians somehow. 9655. judithathome - 10/31/2014 8:24:14 PM Not all corporations are evil but ALL of them have a bottom line and they seldom give money to anyone who doesn't work to enhance that line.
If it's always the politicians at fault, how do you explain corporations backing first timers? Before they know if this candidate will cooperate fully with their intentions? 9656. arkymalarky - 10/31/2014 10:26:25 PM whether they're good or evil is not pertinent to who should control politicians in a democracy. 9657. alistairconnor - 1/7/2015 8:26:26 PM I have completely lost my shit today. You can probably guess why.
Cabu, Wolinski, Tignous, Charb, these guys were cultural icons, France's best political cartoonists. I feel I have lost close friends (I have at least one friend in common with Charb, who was the specific target of the attack).
And the worst part is that they will be ignorantly portrayed as racists and Muslim-haters who were asking for it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Welcome to global jihad. All this goes back to 9/11, or more specifically to the US reaction to it... 9/11 could have been a horrible historical aberration, but instead it has become the defining event of a new era. 9658. judithathome - 1/7/2015 9:54:35 PM My sympathies go out to you, Alistair...clearly, freedom of expression is what has been attacked today.
This action was/is deplorable... 9659. judithathome - 1/7/2015 9:56:12 PM And the worst part is that they will be ignorantly portrayed as racists and Muslim-haters who were asking for it
This thought never entered my mind...I see it as an attack on the truth... 9660. robertjayb - 1/8/2015 1:05:42 AM Sorry,Alistair. Any press anywhere that attempts to make a difference is to be treasured everywhere. And I certainly agree regarding 9/11. Much shame should attach to Bush and the crew who promoted this apparently never-ending horror. Just this afternoon I repeated to spouse as I do too frequently, that that crowd should be in prison, including, sadly, Colin Powell. And here we are likely to elect BushIII. He probably is the smart Bush but he would be accompanied, inevitably, I fear, by the same sort of hangers-on who schooled George. 9661. alistairconnor - 1/8/2015 10:00:47 AM This morning they have released the identities of the suspects, two brothers. One of them has already done prison in 2008/2009 for belonging to a terrorist organisation. At his trial, he claimed he was motivated by outrage about Abou Ghraib. 9662. bhelpuri - 1/8/2015 3:15:50 PM In my opinion, it is wrong to frame this Paris massacre in the context of free speech, or indeed as a response to the specific (egregiously crass) Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
Instead this is an episode in a "war", an attack that took place in the context of what many people (including state actors, including much of the US military, including Al Qaeda) seem to believe is an ongoing war between some countries in the West and Muslims. The attackers - certainly in their own minds - were "soldiers", and Charlie Hebdo no more than a convenient soft target. The main reason the cartoonists were attacked is because it was relatively easy to do so...
Of course my sympathies lie very close to Connor's, but it still remains that the Hebdo cartoonists are a tiny, fractional sideshow to the main "war" that increasing numbers of people believe they are engaged in. 9663. Ms. No - 1/9/2015 1:35:09 AM I wonder if it might not serve everyone much better to quit identifying whackadoo murderers by their beliefs.
In the end it doesn't matter that any of these terrorists is Muslim. They aren't mass murderers because they're Muslim. They're murderers because they are sociopathic nutjobs. Referring to them as "radical islamists" legitimizes them to some degree by putting them on a spectrum with other Muslims.
If we quit framing each of these attacks as part of something bigger --- some global war on "terror" or a rejection of American Imperialism --- then much of the "terror" goes away. I don't mean the horror of any single event, but the constant, grinding stress of being on alert all the damn time. That's the whole point of terrorism to begin with --- strike five or six times a year, but touch all 365 with fear of your name.
The only way to combat terror is to not be afraid. We don't leave our homes every day terrified that we're going to die in a car accident, but that is some 'leventy-thousand times more likely than dying in a terrorist attack.
9664. robertjayb - 1/9/2015 5:51:01 AM So smart it deserves a far greater audience than we few web geezers. Thanks...
9665. arkymalarky - 1/9/2015 3:41:00 PM I'm with no. These acts are far more Columbine than al Qaeda. 9666. judithathome - 1/9/2015 7:57:59 PM Well, it's a shame then that the people DOING these things identify with Islam. They shout out that fact before they shoot... 9667. arkymalarky - 1/10/2015 5:33:34 PM recruitment, funding, and planning support may come from what's left of al Qaeda infrastructure in Yemen, but it comes to vulnerable young ethnic male citizens through the prison systems who karaoke hip hop, smoke pot and take selfies with weapons (not unlike methheads here and other groupings in cities) and I wonder if any even picked up the Koran, much less read or studied it. it seems now to reflect more a personality type (albeit a dangerous one, no matter the ideology it attaches itself to) than a disciplined, purposeful group. but that also makes it harder to target, monitor, and address.
Alistair, Chris Hayes last night published a stat saying 60% of prisoners in France are Muslim and a Muslim guest said they are far less assimilated there than in the US. I know France doesn't allow the hijab or other religious dress in schools? what's your view of the French Muslim situation in France? How much comes from people of Algerian descent? the context of this seems to be more than radicalization of those specific terrorists. if so, this becomes more than a horrible isolated incident for France. 9668. robertjayb - 1/10/2015 7:49:34 PM Can this be true?
YOLA, Nigeria (AP) — Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the "deadliest massacre" in the history of Boko Haram
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An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
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This is madness. Beyond evil.
(USA Today)
9669. wabbit - 1/10/2015 8:09:57 PM Amnesty International - Nigeria: Massacre Possibly Deadliest in Boko Haram’s history 9670. wabbit - 1/12/2015 12:31:50 AM Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: ...When the Ku Klux Klan burn a cross in a black family’s yard, prominent Christians aren’t required to explain how these aren’t really Christian acts. Most people already realize that the KKK doesn’t represent Christian teachings. That’s what I and other Muslims long for—the day when these terrorists praising Mohammed or Allah’s name as they debase their actual teachings are instantly recognized as thugs disguising themselves as Muslims... 9671. bhelpuri - 1/13/2015 12:51:02 PM This by Teju Cole is on-point.
Excerpt:
This week’s events took place against the backdrop of France’s ugly colonial history, its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression, in the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions, such as the hijab. Blacks have hardly had it easier in Charlie Hebdo: one of the magazine’s cartoons depicts the Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira, who is of Guianese origin, as a monkey (naturally, the defense is that a violently racist image was being used to satirize racism); another portrays Obama with the black-Sambo imagery familiar from Jim Crow-era illustrations.
On Thursday morning, the day after the massacre, I happened to be in Paris. The headline of Le Figaro was “LA LIBERTÉ ASSASSINÉE.” Le Parisien and L’Humanité also used the word liberté in their headlines. Liberty was indeed under attack—as a writer, I cherish the right to offend, and I support that right in other writers—but what was being excluded in this framing? A tone of genuine puzzlement always seems to accompany terrorist attacks in the centers of Western power. Why have they visited violent horror on our peaceful societies? Why do they kill when we don’t? A widely shared illustration, by Lucille Clerc, of a broken pencil regenerating itself as two sharpened pencils, was typical. The message was clear, as it was with the hashtag #jesuischarlie: that what is at stake is not merely the right of people to draw what they wish but that, in the wake of the murders, what they drew should be celebrated and disseminated. Accordingly, not only have many of Charlie Hebdo’s images been published and shared, but the magazine itself has received large sums of money in the wake of the attacks—a hundred thousand pounds from the Guardian Media Group and three hundred thousand dollars from Google.
But it is possible to defend the right to obscene and racist speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. It is possible to approve of sacrilege without endorsing racism. And it is possible to consider Islamophobia immoral without wishing it illegal. Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions.
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