I'm typing this from San Francisco. My partner Eve and I were just in Paris yesterday, about a block from where one of the attacks took place. It feels a little surreal. I'm watching the news and thinking, man, I was just there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/14/world/europe/paris-shooting-attacks.html

Dear god. I can't even imagine wha it must be like to be there right now. My thoughts go out to everyone affected.

We watched the breaking news before going to bed last night. Yeah, shock. Paris is a frequent holiday destination for us, just the end of a two-hour train ride.

The guy living upstairs from us is a counter-terrorist police officer, and I hope he's good at his job. We're just waiting for the inevitable attack on London, especially in the wake of this Jihadi John assassination.

Jihadi John

I'd be surprised if the Paris atrocity is linked to the above. They have their own problems with French Algerians (see Charlie Hebdo).

A video report in The New York Times is titled: The World Stands in Solidarity.

What BS! If that were true, the Chinese would have come to the aid of the "West" with a million of their military and extirpated the "threat". They're pretty good at that sort of thing — just think about the Korean "conflict" six decades ago.
And given that the "West", especially the USA, is indebted to the tune of trillions of dollars to China, it would just be prudent for China to protect its investment.

ISIS/ISL can't be seen as a ragtag and impromptu band of outcasts of the Arab world (albeit abetted by other disaffected scum). Just look at how they're outfitted and supplied and organized.

A military "DDOS" is the way to go, but the solution may well require atrocities even more dramatic than those perpetrated by ISIS/ISL, possibly even a nuclear option. Let's just stop with the haphazard and piecemeal game-playing; the optics have long since turned negative.

Gaia is going for payback, and we can all watch it on TV and iPads and iPhones. Better entertainment than "Real Housewives of Damascus"!

The New York Times shows various peoples of the world standing in solidarity with Parisians and you call it "BS" because of the way some of their governments are or are not acting. Look again, the video was about people, not politics.


Hardly. The slaughter of innocent civilians is never entertainment, whether in Paris, a beach in Tunisia, a London subway, streets of Lebanon, or anywhere else.

Mea culpa for not being explicit; I was referring only to the title of the report, not its content.


All news, good or bad, is entertainment, and that comment was (clearly meant to be) deliberately facetious.

To be clear:
All the grievously barbaric acts of ISIS/ISL + al-Qaeda + Talaban + their congeners are deserving of massive retaliation to the point of extermination (as all major affected powers have overtly stated their position/goal to be) — despite such being the very definition of genocide (which the United Nations has declared an international crime — "Genocide is a crime under international law regardless of 'whether committed in time of peace or in time of war' (art. I). Thus, irrespective of the context in which it occurs (for example, peace time, internal strife, international armed conflict or whatever the general overall situation) genocide is a punishable international crime." — but apparently legitimate in the present context). To such end, it is inevitable that even more innocent parties are going to suffer and die, even if through "collateral damage" (a sad euphemism). It is an inevitable price to be paid in the process.
A soupçon of levity, even of the darker variety, can help to keep one on an even keel amidst the horror.

It's not clear to me that killing all the people who hold some particular ideology is the same as genocide. Not everyone who supports a violent Caliphate shares the same ethnicity, and not everyone who has a particular ethnicity supports a Caliphate, by way of one example.

Even in ISIS-controlled cities, the majority of the population is not ideologically or dogmatically allied with ISIS, and that's precisely the problem: if you have a town of 400,000, like Raqqa, that is ISIS-controlled, perhaps only a few hundred people in that town are actually affiliated with ISIS in any meaningful way. The rest are people who could not get out fast enough. Control of the town is maintained through whippings, beheadings, crucifixions, and mass executions:

http://www.worldcrunch.com/world-affairs...ories/c1s18693/

In conventional warfare, an army opposes an army, each organized and directed by a nation-state. But how do you "wipe out" an insurgency that holds territory not by means of government, but through mass terror and execution? If you bomb Raqqa, what exactly will you accomplish, besides killing civilians who already hate ISIS?

I read recent thoughtful reports speculating one purpose, maybe THE purpose, of the attacks on Paris were intended to induce Europe to close its borders thus stopping, or at least slowing, the out migration of the Syrians from ISIS controlled or influenced areas. The Syrian population in the IS controlled areas have been maintaining at least the semblance of an economy as well as serving as hostages against stronger conventional warfare tactics. If too many Syrians leave it would not only destroy any local economy, it might make the IS itself more vulnerable to conventional military action.

Oh boy, there’s a host of things here I have to differ with. First, make no mistake, for all intents and purposes ISIS is a state, and as such fundamentally different from Al Qaeda and related organizations, despite the fact that it has lots in common with those as well. After all, holding territory through mass terror and execution never precluded governments, last time I checked. But in and by itself, that’s often insufficient incentive for other nations to put up with the investment to defeat such rogue states. You defeat them by physically attacking them, and that may include bombing them. By bombing Raqqa you accomplish the same thing any conventional war achieved with bombing any location held by the ‘enemy’: you make it easier to expel that enemy on the ground and occupy that location. To my knowledge, civilians have never played a controlling role in that process, and certainly not the ones on the side being attacked. They just get killed in large numbers by both sides, unless they manage to escape safely.

It turns out that most if not all of the attackers in Paris were born EU citizens. Refugees have yet to play a significant role in terror attacks there. To me blaming (Syrian*) refugees sounds like a convenient excuse to follow populist dogma that closing borders would solve the problem. It won’t, for the problem is already there. Still, populists have never been hindered by such facts, and their conveniently self-serving delusions will likely prevail now too. The inevitable result will be that in doing so they’ll vastly increase the pool of ISIS recruits with reason to go out with a bang.

*) Syrians are only a (large) fraction of the flood of refugees/migrants currently streaming into the EU.

If ISIS is looking to keep the local economy going, not killing the Syrians who are living in the towns might be a good place to start.

I seriously doubt they care more for their local economy than for their religion. The fact that they even consider suicide attacks underscores this pretty well. They have an agenda, and everyone/everything else be damned. They've bought and paid for the adjective "radical".