I completely agree that if you have changed your mind from September because the reasons you relied on for your position in September no longer seem convincing upon reflection, or some information you didn't have that is pertinent has caused you to change your mind, you absolutely should. Despite many peoples' apparent inclination to the contrary, there's nothing laudable about sticking to your convictions; if you thought something but it turns out you're wrong, stop being wrong.
However, if in response to a horrifying event like this you're reacting out of fear, and let's face it that's all a change of position as a result of this news would be... that's not a rational re-examination of your perspective. It's not considered and it should be discouraged.
And to address your third paragraph, the danger existed before and was weighed as a risk factor in the overall cost-benefit analysis. That risk has not changed simply because it has materialized elsewhere. If this was a good idea before in spite of that risk, however remote or not remote, it's still a good idea. If it wasn't a good idea before, it hasn't become a worse one.
But you are giving the voting public too much credit. They may arrive at wrong conclusions for emotional reasons (and the typical sophistry from the Liberals), and they may be re-directed to the right decision for emotional reasons.
If people have changed their mind to the correct way of thinking, I care little for why they arrived at either conclusion.
Awesome they came threw with a token after everyone else, how about these Arab states do something other than talk for a change? I want to see a Sunni Arab state step up and show the world ISIS doesn't represent them and fight them....until then...I have zero faith in any of them.
So how are they finding intact passports from attackers that blew themselves to smithereens. And if you are an attacker hell bent on blowing yourself up, why would you go out on your last night carrying a passport?
But you are giving the voting public too much credit. They may arrive at wrong conclusions for emotional reasons (and the typical sophistry from the Liberals), and they may be re-directed to the right decision for emotional reasons.
Yeah, not prepared to roll that dice or to amend my suggestion as to how to arrive at a conclusion to address the lowest common denominator.
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If people have changed their mind to the correct way of thinking, I care little for why they arrived at either conclusion.
Totally disagree with you here, because how you arrived at this conclusion contains all of the information about how you're going to arrive at the next one. Which might be equally or more important than this one.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
About that "Syrian refugee", last I heard there was no confirmation that the passport actually belonged to one of the attackers, just that it was found on them. Theoretically speaking they could have been carrying it around for propaganda purposes. Even if it did belong to one of the attackers, I find it odd that (again last I've heard) that was the only passport found. Seems unlikely as a coincidence, but awfully convenient if you wanted to specifically direct hate at Syrian refugees.
Also, apparently the attackers at the concert were shouting something along the lines of "This is for Syria", which seems really out of place. I mean ISIS considers itself to be a state. The Syrian government is one of their many enemies. Seems to me they should have been shouting something like "for the Caliphate".
Of course this is all speculation. Terrorists are often confused young men, and they could have been doing it more to vent out their personal rage, with ISIS just giving them the means and the plan to do it.
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Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
I completely agree that if you have changed your mind from September because the reasons you relied on for your position in September no longer seem convincing upon reflection, or some information you didn't have that is pertinent has caused you to change your mind, you absolutely should. Despite many peoples' apparent inclination to the contrary, there's nothing laudable about sticking to your convictions; if you thought something but it turns out you're wrong, stop being wrong.
However, if in response to a horrifying event like this you're reacting out of fear, and let's face it that's all a change of position as a result of this news would be... that's not a rational re-examination of your perspective. It's not considered and it should be discouraged.
And to address your third paragraph, the danger existed before and was weighed as a risk factor in the overall cost-benefit analysis. That risk has not changed simply because it has materialized elsewhere. If this was a good idea before in spite of that risk, however remote or not remote, it's still a good idea. If it wasn't a good idea before, it hasn't become a worse one.
Sorry I thought we were talking about your average Canadians outlook on accepting 25,000 Syrian refugees fleeing war ravaged conditions, not some government policy backed by "cost-benefit" analysis.
If you think in September (and even today) that any "vote" made in a poll about this wasn't based almost exclusively on emotions of the moment, I have ocean front property to sell you in Arizona...really cheap. They sure as hell weren't thinking about cost-benefits. This is an average person answering a pretty simple question.
Yes people are going to be basing that decision now on fear (or having more information)...because its now turned out that ISIL operatives have posed as refugees to gain access to the West and helped pull off a large scale attack.
I really don't understand what anyone could have a problem with in understanding this. Again, things have changed from when those poll questions were asked, and changed in a big way.
Also, and again, I might be wrong about it, but I somehow doubt that the average Canadian wouldn't lean towards their own safety as an over riding factor in making a decision like the one being asked.
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You cannot export democracy to tribal societies. Democracy functions only in places where there is loyalty to the nation. That allows for peaceful transfer of power - the Democrats and Republicans hate each other, but in the end they know that each is American first and foremost. In the Middle East and most of Africa the first loyalty is to the clan and/or tribe and/or sect, so politics becomes a zero-sum game. You cannot afford to lose power. You can bring in democracy, but it will be of the "one man, one vote, one time" sort. There are certainly exceptions to be found here and there, but the rule holds.
The above says more about how little you know about the Middle-East, what the word "tribe" means, and about various projects to establish democracy than it does about Middle-East.
Let's start with the word "tribe".
Pretty much all societies used to be "tribal" as one meaning of the word is literally "pre-state". (Clans still exist in Scotland btw, and nobody thinks they're not democratic.) It's also means "largely independent societies outside of state", and those really didn't exist much in the Middle-East before the US destroyed Iraq and Syria descended into civil war. Most Iraqis were simply Iraqis while that thing still existed.
Most of the groups we in the west call "tribes" are things like local ethnic minorities, religious minorities and local armed militias. One reason the Western governments like to call them "tribes" is so they can conveniently bypass the questions of "what do those groups want". After all tribes in the western minds don't have goals, they're just there.
There are of course also some actual tribes in the area, but these are a minority in the big picture.
It's also completely absurd to claim that tribes and democracy don't mix. Many tribes in the very traditional sense had/have some sort of democracies, with elected representatives regurarly gathering to make decisions through voting and debate.
Large parts of Europe used to be "tribal" too, like the areas where we now have the Nordic countries (which are generally considered to be among the most democratic in the world).
There are numerous very recent examples of succesfully introducing local democracy to societies that previously did not have them. The reason they don't stick usually has little do with the societies themselves, as generally those attempts at democracy are seen as threatening by someone with power and interests in the area and are crushed violently.
In Syria when the civil war started, the pro-democracy rebels originally had quite succesful local democracies in the areas they controlled. These only collapsed once the war got prolonged, the societies in general collapsed, and the rebels mostly became radicalized or taken over by radical islamists.
In short, the biggest thing stopping democracy in the Middle-East is the constant violence. Security would enable democracy.
A large part of the problem in the Middle-East is that democracy is not in the interests of anyone who currently has power there. The local armed groups generally are most interested in ruling with their guns, and the Western nations have historically never had any real interest in supporting democracies outside of Europe, especially in oil-rich countries. In fact quite the contrary, they have traditionally supported dictatorships, because those are convenient to deal with.
“We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war…. all I want is to be with my family, my children.”
When he has been taken away we have the chance to find out just what he was found guilty of, how they found him, and what the evidence was. He was a master of the car bomb, detonating at least four of them in Kirkuk itself and also one scooter bomb, which exploded in a crowded souq selling weapons, killing many scores of people and also weakening the ability of local residents to fight ISIS. He was found through the capture of one of the financers of the sleeper cells in Kirkuk, who had on him a list of pseudonyms along with phone numbers and amounts of money. The police had this man call each person on the list, a cell of six, and set up meetings, where the police captured them—all of them swept up in one day. This man saw that they were there and “he collapsed; he gave us 5 pages of confession.” He stuck to his confession in court, where he was tried under Article 40, the Iraqi law on terrorism, which carries the death penalty.
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He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”
This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”
ISIS is the first group since Al Qaeda to offer these young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe.
These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends.
In short: confused angry young men with a bad childhoods and some quite legitimate feelings of being wronged doing extremely stupid things that are clearly counter-productive to what they want the most.
That guy could basically be a ghetto youth in the west. No wonder the ISIS methods are sometimes said to be more like those of the Mexican drug gangs than something resembing a proper political group trying to set up a nation of their own.
People like this are also infamously hard to reach. If you wanted to make them understand "the error of their ways" that is.
Thanks for the patronizing response, but I know exactly what I am talking about. Let me restate that for you - these societies are largely incapable of functioning as parliamentary democracies where power is passed peacefully from one group to another because the primary loyalty is to the group as opposed to the state. Whatever the reason.
Thanks for the patronizing response, but I know exactly what I am talking about. Let me restate that for you - these societies are largely incapable of functioning as parliamentary democracies where power is passed peacefully from one group to another because the primary loyalty is to the group as opposed to the state. Whatever the reason.
I'm sorry but you obviously don't, and just repeating that you do does not make it so.
