Pakistan Taliban kill scores in Peshawar school massacre

As Liet pointed out in the Sydney thread, there is no such thing as a "correct" interpretation of a collection of works that most of us would agree is fiction. The Bible, Torah, Quran, and most major religious texts are so self-contradictory and obviously written by different people with different viewpoints that it is literally impossible to follow the entire thing in a consistent manner. All religious branches involve picking and choosing certain parts to focus on.

The Torah is full of fucked up instructions and naziesque chosen peoples bullshit. Christianity has been used as justification for many things in the last couple of centuries, including the attempted ethnic cleansing of the North American and Australian continents during which slaughters like this one were common.

Religion is what people make of it, Anders Breivik described himself as culturally Christian and said he planned to pray to God for help during his attacks. South Africa in the apartheid era had a government mostly comprised of Christians.

Islam certainly can be interpreted violently by someone who reads the fucked up parts and ignores the good ones. As can every religion. Most Muslims are good people, as are most Christians, Jews, Atheists and members of all the worlds major belief systems.

Unfortunately, right now there is a branch of Islam that is based around the violent parts, and it happens to have followers in parts of the world that are very unstable. That combination leads to atrocities like this one.

Let's get one thing very crystal clear. The Taliban are evil. Their interpretation of Islam needs to be stamped out and the world will be a better place once it has been.

The Taliban are an enemy that we as humans should be focused on making extinct.

You know what won't help accomplish that? Labelling an entire quarter of the worlds population as inherently and irredeemably evil.

The Koran doesn't have a boatload of multiple authors. It wasn't even written by a person, it was handed down from Allah to his prophet Muhammed, PBUH. If you dispute that then you must be killed.

Also, I must have missed where we tried to ethnically cleanse North America, although the first American school massacre was committed by Indians.

Unfortunately the number of insane people out there mean it probably will happen some day, but the fact these things are rare in Western countries back up the idea that people are inherently good, or that at least in a stable society extremist religious views find it hard to take hold.

There are 2 million Muslims in the USA. If even 0.1% of them were of the same mindset as the Taliban fighters who committed this atrocity then the type of incident you describe would be a weekly event.

The fact these incidents aren't for the most part happening in our countries proves that Islam is not inherently evil (although there are certainly many aspects of it I disagree with).

I know, and the odds that it would affect anyone persons life are extremely low.

That said, this comment today sums up my disgust at the actions of the day...

@josswhedon: Someone sent those men into that school. Someone is hearing the reports from Peshawar and thinking, "Good job."I can't get past that.

Agreed. It makes me heartsick.

And those men were praying that these school children wouldn't be as tough as that girl on that bus a couple of years ago. How fucking pathetic is that?

You think Dayton is alone in that belief? I can assure that plenty of people share it. Why else would folks like Ann Coulter get so much attention?

Sorry, but every religion is based on irrational beliefs, and all of them pose the same level of threat to the survival of humanity that you think Islam does. We have people who think that there's no point to worrying about the environment since the End Times are due any day now. Limiting the threat to Islam is ignoring those within the US who are just as large a danger from outside the US.

You want to stop the terroristic elements in Islam? Fine. Bombings and executions alone won't work (though they're certainly necessary at times). As I've said before, the bulk of American political thought has not been translated into the local languages, and until those things are translated into the local languages of the Mid-East, we can't expect an improvement in that part of the world.

There's a difference between saying "I don't need to care about the environment because the End Times are coming" (probably quite a rare belief among Christians, btw) and "You do not want to accept my vision of Islam and so I will kill you" (which seems pretty common).

It may be that radical Christianity or radical Judaism or radical Buddhism or radical Shintoism will be future sources of global instability and oppression, but TODAY it's radical Islam that's filling that role.

It all depends upon where you live. If you're in Sri Lanka, its not the Muslims that are doing the mass killings. If you're in Burma/Myanmar, its not the Muslims who're doing the mass killings. Depending upon where you are in Kashmir, it may or may not be the Muslims who're doing the mass killings. If you live in parts of Central and South America, its not the Muslims who're doing the mass killings. The simple truth of the matter is that we're fixated on Islam ATM, so we pay attention to what they're doing. If you look around the world, you'll see the same level of murderous intent being expressed by people of all faiths, and religious based mass killings in all but the developed nations.

Actually you don't. A recent international study found that over 80 percent of all terrorist attacks worldwide came from members of just one religion. Care to guess which one?

Sure. Just as soon as you can come up with a definition of terrorism which everyone can agree upon. Funny thing about that, what one country calls "terrorism" another country calls "legitimate warfare." Assuming they recognize it as being an event at all. I've read accounts of people being hog tied and dumped in a river, yet their deaths being ruled a "suicide." (Interestingly enough, at least one of those individuals was an American citizen, who was killed in the '80s.)

BTW, care to link to that study?

Maybe, but what consequence do conflicts in those remote or isolated regions really have for the rest of the world?

Not saying that they're "better" than radical Islamists; just saying that they're not a threat to global order. If I'm prioritizing where to put my smart bomb dollar, it's going to be toward the guys who crash passenger jets into skyscrapers in downtown NYC.

We're fixated on (radical) Islam because that's what affects us and the rest of the civilized world. It was radical Islam that brought the terror attacks on 9/11. It's radical Islam that is far and away the most pernicious on a global scale.

So what? The argument *isn't* that radical Islam needs to be wiped out because it's the worst thing humanity has to offer. The argument is that it needs to be wiped out because it's destructive and destabilizing on a near-global scale.

When I read an English translation it was mostly just rambling bullshit full of a lot of contradictions.

I know what you mean...is what I would be saying if I was high on methamphetamines.

There are many. The Global terrorism database from the University of Maryland has a nice globe that looks about like a map of the Islamic world, plus a couple of violent Marxist movements, one in India and FARC in Columbia. The State Department also has some resources.

I don't know. Do you consider Syria to be "local"?

Many people didn't consider the Taliban to be a threat to the US prior to 9/11. I can remember a handful of people saying we ought to keep an eye on them after they announced that they were going to blow up the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, while other people saying that it wasn't something the US should care about, even if it was repellent what they were doing. Had we picked that moment to intervene, 9/11 might never have happened. On the other hand, had we not decided to ship arms to Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded, the Taliban might never have come to power, or might never have decided to give safe haven to Bin Laden.

Is it? How many violent acts in Europe have happened because of someone wanting to avenge an "offense" to Allah, and how many have happened because of some other stupid belief? 20,000 Americans died of AIDS before Reagan mentioned the disease. Supposedly, Reagan felt that AIDS was God's punishment on homosexuals, and it was only after groups like ACT UP made asses of themselves that he decided to talk about funding research on the disease. Are the deaths of those 20,000 people somehow less meaningful than the 3,000+ who died on 9/11 because it was AIDS that killed them, and not planes flown into buildings by lunatics?

And I'll give old Ronnie the benefit of the doubt here, and say that he was concerned about the disease as soon as he learned about it. He still didn't mention it until 20,000 Americans (and that's probably a low number, since there's evidence that others in the US had died of it as early as the 1950s) and who knows how many non-Americans died of it. Why would he do such a thing? Well, a strong possibility is that there's a large number of Christians in the US who think that homosexuality is an abomination, and Reagan, being the good politician that he was (no sarcasm meant, the man understood politics better than most Presidents), knew that addressing the issue before public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of acting to try and find a cure for the disease, was political suicide. So, what was it that tied Ronnie's hands? Was he a bigot? Or was he politically astute and knew that the masses of America wouldn't cotton to the government spending money to help save the homosexuals?

Given that Reagan was an actor, and thus probably worked closely with a number of gays, I've got no problem in someone claiming that he was sympathetic to gay issues, and had political forces not been against him, the moment he learned about AIDS (or as it was originally known, Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome), he would have started pouring money into research into the subject. It could be, but that doesn't absolve those who put pressure upon him to ignore the matter for as long as he did. (And, yes, the signs were there as far back as at least Carter, if not Ford, so you can blame them as well.)

Which gives no definition as to what it classifies as "terrorism." I note that there's no mention of Sudan or South Sudan, which, when it was a single country was engaged in a civil war (that was religious based), and South Sudan is presently engaged in a civil war, that has religious overtones to it. Ya gonna try and tell me that there's no terrorism going on in either of those countries?

Funny thing about the State Department, they're not the universal arbitrator of what constitutes a "terrorist attack" by any stretch of the imagination. Remember, they helped put Saddam in power back in the '50s, and it was the operations by people with connections to the CIA who inspired Che Guevara to become a revolutionary. (I've got no problem with Che being classified as a terrorist, but I also know that he wasn't sitting on the beach drinking rum when he decided to become one.)

^You are making a classic error though. Assuming that "spending money" (i.e. federal money) on a problem would've led to it being solved more quickly (this in regards to AIDS).

Technology including medical technology can't aways advance in direct proportion to the money spent on it. As the saying goes.

"Just because one woman can produce a baby in 9 months doesn't mean you can produce a baby in one month by putting 9 women on the job".

Edited

Saddam Hussein was 13 years old in 1950 and a 21 year old brand new party flunky in 1958.

I doubt the State Department "put Saddam in power back in the 50s.

Of course you doubt a history you know nothing about. Saddam didn't sprout out of the ground. Take a look at the politics of his time and place and you'll see what Tuckerfan's talking about.

So, if the State Department played a role in the 1958 Revolution in Iraq, we can draw a direct line from there to the rise of Saddam Hussein TWENTY YEARS later?f

You gotta draw the line somewhere. I think two decades is more than enough room to draw one.

Not at all what I said. But as you've indicated in the past, you're not that interested in world history, so

I never said I wasn't that interested in world history.

Not that interested in the people of other nations opinions of America or American policies though.

Find me eight more like this and we'll get started on testing.

John, that woman couldn't smoke enough weed to let you get to first base even on a wild pitch.

But they chose him according to the ancient prophesy, don't ya know....

Because they may be evil but they aren't stupid.

Imagine a hit on an American school. Or multiple schools around the country.

And big ones too. Like the one in Pakistan or even worse like the one in Beslan that lasted three days and resulted in the deaths of 385 people.

They think America is the Great Satan. We might live up to that insult by the time things wrap up.

You failed to notice she's a ginger. They do it for the souls.