Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

huh "stayed" upstairs is a bit different than "lived" upstairs fwiw

xp ok thanks hadn't seen that clearly cited before.

"shooter-was-bad-person"

"“There were a lot of questions drawn with Sandy Hook and whether or not that was a real incident or not,” Mr. Chesley told reporters alongside family attorney Mohammad Abuershaid."

oh jesus

― akm, Friday, December 4, 2015 10:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i lost my mind at this

what are the fucking odds of this

yeah the questions were drawn by this guy iirc

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/XoGSf2vC6gE/mqdefault.jpg

"shooter-was-bad-person"

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Friday, December 4, 2015 6:21 PM (3 hours ago)

lol

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/prayer-gun-control-mass-shooting-san-bernardino/418563/

probably one of the dumbest things i've ever read

which part?

the gist of the piece is that it's wrong to criticize politicians for tweeting their meaningless "thoughts and prayers" because prayer used to be a major part of american life and can't we all just get along

Fuck public ostentatious shows of prayer as a substitute for actual reform.

you can criticize politicians all you want for invoking prayer in these situations. they won't stop, because they know it reassures their constituents and there is no political cost for doing it. it only makes sense to mention it in contrast to their lack of any further, more effective actions. if you just criticize the invocation of prayer, you are automatically relegated to the status of a crank.

i'm fully aware that religious folk in the US are so sensitive that if you even remotely associate any type of criticism with the act of prayer they stare at you like you just took a shit in the baptismal font. it's a losing battle - basically to avoid whining from the religious right you just have to let them pray loudly and wildly and stay the fuck out of their way while they do it.

the new Butthurt Xtian film genre that has come out of it has been a non-stop source of lols, though, so there's that (still need to hatewatch God is Not Dead)

Can also be posted in the "American Right Wing" thread: http://gawker.com/right-wing-gun-idolator-erick-erickson-flies-into-a-rag-1746415072

hope the rag is ok

Yeah but there IS now a political cost, and there is now a whole cohort of voting age Americans who will shit in the baptismal font and instagram it for the lolz. The guns & god right is walking into an electoral band saw.

god i hope so

Obama making an address from the Oval Office tomorrow night

i'm not sure guns are really enough of an old vs young issue that we can be sure the problem is going to improve with time

Farook was "fixated" on Israel and supported ISIS' ideology of establishing an Islamic caliphate, his father told an Italian newspaper.

Before the shooting, the younger Farook had expressed some troubling beliefs, his father told La Stampa newspaper.

"He said he shared the ideology of (Abu Bakr) al-Baghdadi to create an Islamic state, and he was fixated on Israel," the elder Farook said, referring to the ISIS leader.

The father, also named Syed Farook, recalled the first time he saw his son with a gun.

"I became angry. In 45 years in the United States, I yelled, 'I have never had a weapon.' He shrugged his shoulders and replied, 'Your loss,' " the father said.

Damn.

headlines were calling these two "terror couple" all morning which of course made me think "kill colonel". they've changed it to 'terror duo' which isn't as fun.

whose headlines?

cnn I think

folie a terror deux

nomar what's that quote from

The CNN story.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/07/us/san-bernardino-shooting/

Chesley told CNN Monday that the father was on medications and didn't recall making those comments to the Italian newspaper.

their very bad attorney doing a very bad job of trying to backpedal so none of them are held accountable for not raising warning flags sooner.

Farook was "fixated" on Israel and supported ISIS' ideology of establishing an Islamic caliphate, his father told an Italian newspaper.

Thoughts? http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/195673/moderate-islams-real-litmus-test-israel

I've heard the argument made before that antisemitism is the gateway drug to radicalism since it presents a complete conspiracy theory into which one can buy. idk how common anti-Israel sentiment is in Muslim communities v. antisemitism in general v. the weird place where the two intersect but I do wonder if tolerance (and stoking) of that kind of hate is indivisible from more general manifestations against other groups. aka it's not a fire that can be contained.

How, then, did Farook soothe his son when junior ranted about Israel?

“I told him he had to stay calm and be patient,” Farook, Sr. told his interviewer, “because in two years Israel will not exist any more. Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China and America don’t want Jews there any more. They are going to bring the Jews back to Ukraine. What is the point of fighting? We have already done it and we lost. Israel is not to be fought with weapons, but with politics. But he did not listen to me, he was obsessed.”

But he did not listen to me

Listen to the voice of reason, son.

my brother and I (as well as a few other Jewish friends of ours) used to attend a local poker game at a bar that was organized by a non-observant, non-practicing Muslim gentleman who was very sweet until he drunk one night and started talking all kinds of horrible shit about Jews and Israel (and yes, about both - it was during chanukah last year and he was going on about how Jewish holidays are bullshit). me and my brother have gone back once or twice since but none of our other friends have. i don't mean to extrapolate this to every Muslim bc everyone is an individual but my impression is that antisemitism /and/ anti-Zionism are pretty prevalent and i'd love to hear that there's something being done to fight it (as opposed to apologetics about why it's natural + understandable). idk i was loathe to bring this up bc it feels a bit like hobbyhorsing but idk i think it's important and when Obama talks about Muslim communities fighting extremism that's the first thing I think of.

idk why i mentioned that anecdote - i guess bc i was shocked that someone who didn't even really self-identify as a Muslim to the extent that he was willing to drink alcohol was still harboring hateful ideas about Jews and i guess i assumed then that probably a lot of Muslims feel that way and i hate generalizing like that but then i see polls + all kinds of numbers that show that yeah - lots of Muslims have a lot of v negative opinions.

anyway, maybe relevant: http://www.npr.org/2015/12/07/458797632/6-times-obama-called-on-muslim-communities-to-do-more-about-extremism

Can I ask what were his ethnic origins?

the relationship between muslims and israel seems intractably broken at this point; everything went to shit after Rabin's death, I don't envision it ever getting any better.

idk he was at least second generation american xp

so Obama often says that Muslims should rejected extremism, but he doesn't ever really say that includes rejecting hatred toward other religions or races

at the UN last year he did say: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/24/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nations-general-assembly

"It is one of the tasks of all great religions to accommodate devout faith with a modern, multicultural world. No children are born hating, and no children—anywhere—should be educated to hate other people. There should be no more tolerance of so-called clerics who call upon people to harm innocents because they’re Jewish, or because they’re Christian, or because they’re Muslim. It is time for a new compact among the civilized peoples of this world to eradicate war at its most fundamental source, and that is the corruption of young minds by violent ideology."

He's always droning on huh

jeff goldberg on the topic (and sorry i won't spam this thread w/ more links on this subject/ just wanted to get this off my chest):

And while it is true that Muslim leaders and organizations, in the U.S. and elsewhere, do, in fact, condemn extremism, many do not condemn all forms of extremism and violence, and many remain far too tolerant of Saudi-funded and trained imams in their communities. I’ve argued for 15 years that, in addition to being morally reprehensible in its own right, organized Muslim extremist violence against Israelis, and against other geographically specific enemies of extremist Muslims, is a kind of gateway drug to the broader use of tactics such as suicide bombing. It was 15 years ago, in Cairo, that I had an argument with Amr Moussa, who was then Egypt’s foreign minister, about widespread Muslim support for mass terrorism, particularly suicide bombings, directed at innocent Israelis. I made the argument to Moussa that tactics used against Israelis would one day be used by Muslims against other Muslims. It seemed obvious to me, but not to him. Sometimes I’m wrong, but I wasn’t wrong then.

Where this always falls down is on what people are actually expected to do. There is no structured 'Muslim community' in any country i'm aware of. There might be a Somali community, an Iranian community or a Turkish community but no overarching organisation or leadership to unite them. Even that is a stretch given hot atomised contemporary urban society is. How do Muslims remove 'Saudi-funded clerics' from their local areas if the police and government can't? It's something that came up time and again in my local area with a mosque that was later linked to all sorts of dubious stuff - people stopped going, complained to the authorities, etc, but there's not much else that they can do beyond that. It took the police about ten years to catch up.

I think that's Obama's argument, right? That change in a diverse group of communities that may foster radicalism has to come from within because it can't be imposed from without?

It can't really be "imposed" from within though. For the most part, it looks like the people getting sucked into terrorism are already on the fringes of, or removed from, whichever communities they might have once been part of.

Jeffrey Goldberg is a moron. "would one day be used against other Muslims" -- they have been used against other Muslims for about as long as they have been used at all.

lol I knew that was going to be in the Atlantic before I clicked it too. What a shitty media outlet that has become.

many do not condemn all forms of extremism and violence

this is true of everybody tho

many remain far too tolerant of Saudi-funded and trained imams in their communities

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/hillary-clinton-foundation-state-arms-deals

I think there are problems w/ arming the KSA (cf Yemen) but I don't getting fighter jets from Boeing encouraged/enabled them to support Wahhabism abroad. Ultimately they're a military ally of the US /and/ they need to stop exporting radicalism.

Yeah, don't think that'll ever happen with this regime. Too dependent on the clerics, too corrupt to live up to the tenets otherwise. Really, depending on SA as THE regional muslim ally means accepting them exporting radicalism.