7 ms·

I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth. ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a bo

I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth. ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia. They say this every time they attack us. Yet (mostly on the left) we keep coming up with reasons why this isn't the case. "No, actually, you're not attacking us for that reason, really it's our fault because we gave the oil to the emirs." When someone shoots up a Planned Parenthood, however, he doesn't even have to make a public statement and the same people are quick to blame Christian beliefs or rhetoric and immediately accept the ideological reason for the violence. Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States? Finally, is there anywhere to find the original article by Piketty in English? The linked version is in French.

mtsr 11y ago
It just so happens that Piketty is French. Maybe you can find a translation somewhere, though.
criley2 11y ago
"I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth." Because they're proven masters at propaganda and messaging. To take prop at face value is the definition of naive. "ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia." That's their justification for their actions, not the reason. Come on. Recruiting for ISIS pays $5000 - $10000 per successful recruit. If their true motivation is purely religious, if religion is the INCENTIVE, then why incentivize people with lump sumps larger than yearly income from honest work? ISIS represents a way out of poverty, at least, that's how they sell it in recruiting. "When someone shoots up a Planned Parenthood, however, he doesn't even have to make a public statement and the same people are quick to blame Christian beliefs or rhetoric and immediately accept the ideological reason for the violence." We call that quid pro quo, and yes, it's intentional. If Islam itself is responsible for the actions of a minority of a minority, then it stands to reason that Christianity itself is responsible for the actions of a minority of a minority. So long as conservatives blame Islam in general for ISIS, we will blame Christianity in general for Westboro Baptist, for Clinic Terrorists, for Jehovah Witness child negligence murder, etc. "Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States?" We do, often, we bemoan the war against education (ignorance as pride) and growing wealth inequality for social tension and violence both here in America and worldwide.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Ah. People are in poverty and to get out of poverty they blow themselves up in a public place such that they can murder a bunch of innocent civilians in the process. Got it. Good to know.
  - criley2 11y ago
    If your country was destroyed, there was no jobs, you had no money, no food, your home was crumbling, your siblings starving, your parents helpless... and you were 17 and powerless, and someone offered you $10,000 to do it... would you? Would you do something terrible to ensure that your family got a huge payday that would put food on their table for potentially years?
    - forrestthewoods 11y ago
      No. No I would not murder dozens of innocent people. There's a lot of poverty in the world and the vast majority of the impoverished do not commit such atrocities.
      - criley2 11y ago
        "no I wouldn't" I guess it was too much to ask you to walk a mile in their shoes, because we internet dwelling rich folk literally cannot comprehend poverty on this level, of watching your family die before your eyes as a teenager. "vast majority of the impoverished do not commit such atrocities." The vast majority don't have a years pay untaxed offered, never have to make the choice. Easy to say they won't do something when they have no option to do it. Then again, with how INCREDIBLY SUCCESSFUL ISIS has been at recruiting perhaps you need to reevaluate your opinion of how the impoverished of the world behave when given opportunity. Many impoverished will loot during riots or engage in widespread gang violence in cities, they'll overthrow secular governments in favor of Islamic ones in the Arab Spring, they'll take the money and kill for ISIS. I think people need to be more honest and realize that true destitution means they don't have to play within the bounds of economic and moral systems. We're controlled by our jobs and our money, and if we have neither, we will do whatever is necessary to provide for ourselves and our families, including hurting people "from other tribes".
bosdev 11y ago
> Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States? I do. I think the Planned Parenthood shooting is due to a combination of mental illness and lack of education. I don't think it really matters which crazy ideology you pick, you can use it to justify your actions. And if the crazy, uneducated, people weren't shooting up a Planned Parenthood, they would be shooting up a theater, or a school, or any number of other places. The solution is to educate kids and to treat the mentally ill. Why does this tiny group of Muslims commit hate crimes, while the vast majority do not? Piketty thinks it's income inequality, what's your explanation?
- jules 11y ago
  If it's income inequality, then why are most terrorists highly educated and relatively well off?
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > If it's income inequality, then why are most terrorists highly educated and relatively well off? As I understand it, Middle Eastern terrorists are disproportionately from the thin and relatively insecure middle class, neither the oligarchs nor the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. I don't think this is at all inconsistent with income inequality being a major contributing factor, though its not as simple as personal poverty being a driving factor.
    - jules 11y ago
      At the very least that data does not really fit the theory. At some point you have to consider that when the facts do not fit the theory perhaps the theory is wrong, rather than to try to spin the facts in such a way that they fit the theory in a weird way. I think some people are too attached to a particular theory being true, rather than finding out the right theory.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
jlangenauer 11y ago
It's not a case of believing what's coming out of ISIS' mouth - most people, even on the Left you decry, do. The question is why, when they utter this stuff, do so many people listen?
colordrops 11y ago
To address your analogy, proponents of Planned Parenthood aren't killing pro-lifers en mass using robots and tacitly supporting the most extreme pro-lifers to address a third enemy. The analogy doesn't work at all.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
Why would I believe their reasons? If there is one thing I've learned in life, it's that people don't know why they do many (or even any) of the things they do. They do them for reasons unknown to themselves, and then afterward, supposing there is demand, they fabricate reasons. Not lies necessarily, more like their "best guess" as to why they did it. When the judge asks the teenager why he microwaved a live hamster and the teenager says "I don't know" he's not only being honest but actually insightful. And because society demands reasons for every action, most children soon learn that "I don't know" is an unacceptable answer. So no, I don't believe what comes out of ISIS's mouth(s) regarding why they do these things. I'm not sure why you do either, and it's a fact that neither do you.
mikeash 11y ago
Things don't have a single cause. "ISIS grew out of staggeringly unequal distribution of Mideast oil wealth" and "ISIS is motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam" are able to coexist perfectly well. Do you have any examples of "the same people" being inconsistent here? Because usually when people complain about inconsistency like this, it's actually different people being mentally categorized together, not actually the same people.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Last sentence is an excellent point. This is a group of groups of groups. Acting like ISIS is one entity with one set of attributes is like claiming the same for the workforce of a city. They're one thing in one way with similar goals, direction, and activities but substantially different in other ways.
- notacoward 11y ago
  Unbelievably well stated. Kudos. (And I get downvoted for saying something nice? Some people have way too much invested in the opposing POV, and way too little courage.)
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    > And I get downvoted for saying something nice? Some HN (and possibly its rules) frowns on "+1" or "I agree" style posts that don't add additional content to a discussion, and people will sometimes downvote you accordingly. Hopefully that's all that the downvoting was...
pizza 11y ago
You're thinking of ISIS' intent, whereas Piketty's argument is about the circumstances that allow one entity to acquire so much power.
tdkl 11y ago
They aren't allowed to say that they're selling oil to Turkey to pay their "holy fighters" while being kickstarted by USA and Saudi Arabia.
n7c3c1 11y ago
Because the left in the West, more than being attacked by terrorists, is afraid of being seen as politically incorrect.
kohanz 11y ago
There's a difference between the stated motive of ISIS and what enables them to exist and grow. I have a hard time believing that they can be so effective in their recruitment efforts with a message based entirely on an interpretation of an old book. It is more plausible to me that they prey on desperate, mentally unwell, and disaffected people to join their cause.
- CM30 11y ago
  Wait, you have a hard time believing they can be so recruitment with a message based on an interpretation of an old book? More than 2000 years of human history and religion shows that an awful lot of things (both positive and negative for the world) have come from religion, based almost entirely on old books and interpretations. The supposed word of a supposedly all knowing/powerful deity is enough inspiration for an awful lot of people.
- jules 11y ago
  This is simply false. Most terrorists are highly educated. The 9/11 terrorists had a college education, some had PhD's.
  - CM30 11y ago
    Being educated does not mean you're above believing in bullshit. There are a lot of highly educated people with a college education or a PhD who believe him ghosts, crop circles, bigfoot, alien abductions, the 'dangers' of GM food, conspiracy theories or think that vaccines cause autism. That doesn't make those beliefs more plausible, regardless of if a certain amount of smart people believe in them. Similarly, it doesn't shield people from religious extremism, or any other form of extreme view for that matter. People are irrational, some lack critical thinking skills (and everyone forgets to use them at least some of time). You don't become a Vulcan the minute you get through college.
    - jules 11y ago
      Exactly. This is not about desperate, mentally unwell, and disaffected people, but about people who sincerely think that the best thing for this world is to implement the Qur'an to the last letter. You can be a rocket scientist and a religious idiot at the same time.
rgbrgb 11y ago
I won't pretend to know why everything is so fucked right now but I will make 2 points: 1) In general, the people actually doing the killings are far removed from the organization's leadership. Here's an interesting piece on individual Isis fighters: http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/ http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte... 2) Usually when someone is upset, they're very bad at articulating the actual thing that is upsetting them. Often when someone is upset, they'll say (and think) it's about something that is actually unrelated but happened to come right before the outburst of pent up frustration. To me, Islamism is a suspiciously rational explanation for completely irrational violence. Islam's pretty old, the book hasn't changed, but we're seeing a big spike in coordinated terror against civilians in the last couple years.
- iofj 11y ago
  2) is not true. Violence committed because of islam has been pretty steady since the end of WW1 and was much higher before that.
  - jules 11y ago
    No, it has increased a lot. This is a Dutch newspaper, but you should be able to read the graphs: http://static1.volkskrant.nl/static/nmc/red/frameset/2015/terrorismecijfers/ http://static1.volkskrant.nl/static/nmc/red/frameset/2015/te...
    - iofj 11y ago
      This is over a short period and doesn't count stuff like the Sudanese "civil war" muslim raids on Southern villages, which would have made that graph look like a rounding error.
danans 11y ago
There is no reason why both Piketty's and ISIS' rationale can't both be true. ISIS's eschatological religious propaganda wouldn't have nearly the resonance and recruiting power it does if it weren't for the current state of political and economic inequality in the middle east. Also, while the Planned Parenthood shootings are tragic, they are not widespread and frequent enough to be attributed to an aggregate measure such as income inequality. Edit: removed my comment about how we'd have to have Christian armies rising in the US to have a situation comparable to ISIS. Apparently that rubbed some the wrong way.
pyrocat 11y ago
Maybe because the Planned Parenthood shooter specifically mentioned "no more baby parts"? And Planned Parenthood has been HEAVILY featured in the media this last year, falsely painted by the christian right as a baby-killing organization?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Brakenshire 11y ago
ISIS is a fundamentalist millenarian dead cult making up some thousands of people, the question and the issue is why they haven't been run out of the areas where they operate by the ordinary people that live there, and their existing power groups. It is completely uncontroversial that ISIS are substantially tapping into existing and real sectarian grievances in the area. In Syria, that is down to a lack of development in rural Sunnis areas, and human rights abuses by the Shia-led regime. In Iraq, it is down to the loss of power of Sunni groups after the fall of Saddam, and the transition in power and patronage towards the Shia majority. Just saying over and over again that ISIS is evil is just repeating an obvious truth, the question is how do explain their success, and how do you undercut their power base, and a substantial part of that is to do with the allocation of money and power for the Sunni areas in Syria and Iraq.
coffeevradar 11y ago
Here's Le Monde's English translation: http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/11/24/clamping-down-with-law-and-order-will-not-be-enough/ http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/11/24/clamping-down-with...
pille 11y ago
Since you kind of elided it, their stated reason for killing is more or less "because you're not Muslim". We could take it at face value, but there's nothing useful you can do with that information. What would be useful is to know how so many people get to that place. What are the conditions that radicalized thousands to the point where they are willing to kill others just for being less Muslim than they see themselves? I think the Post's use of the word 'blame' is meant to be provocative. Western powers obviously aren't scheming to create ISIS with wealth inequality, and improved wealth distribution obviously won't inspire ISIS to lay down their weapons. But if that inequality really is a cause, it's worth trying to fix it if you want to head off the next manifestation of ISIS.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth. Accepting it doesn't really answer much. > ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia. Yes, and if we accept this, we are faced with the question of what makes particular people in particular times and places likely to accept and act on messages like this, and what circumstances enable them to be successful when they do. Daesh isn't the only group to promote an ideology like this based on interpretation of some ancient religious text (nor is the phenomenon of groups trying, or even succeeding, in doing that limited to the Middle East, or the Islamic world, nor are the Quran the only text which has been used in this role.) Nor, for that matter, was Daesh (though it had a different name!) new to this when they first started achieving real success -- they had similar goals and interpretation of Islam before they became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, when they were known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, and when they rejected their affiliation with al-Qaeda to style themselves first as "the Islamic State in Iraq", then "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant", and finally "the Islamic State". > When someone shoots up a Planned Parenthood, however, he doesn't even have to make a public statement and the same people are quick to blame Christian beliefs or rhetoric and immediately accept the ideological reason for the violence. Women's health clinic attacks by violent religious extremists with an overt religious motivation are a recurring pattern in the US; assuming that another such attack is part of that pattern rather than breaking with it is not exactly a giant leap. In any case, the ideology behind the attack and the conditions which made the attacker susceptible to adopting that ideology are distinct issues. > Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States? Actually, lots of people on the left -- the only people who generally acknowledge the overt ideological motivation of violence of Christian religious extremists -- point to social factors like income inequality and persistent poverty as among the factors that make people susceptible to that extremism (as well as pointing to deliberate acts by certain political elites to fan that extremism and channel it for political ends as contributing to the uptake of the extremism.) These positions are complementary, rather than incompatible.
beat 11y ago
Rudimentary talk-radio analysis aside... I find Daesh far scarier than other Islamic fundamentalist movements because their techniques are more sophisticated and their aim is much higher. The "they're killing us!" argument is so silly... terror attacks are to stir western nations into violent action, not to actually significantly injure us. And it works - far too many Americans and Europeans live and act politically in abject terror of very low-impact, unlikely events. What scares me about Daesh, though, is that I think they're trying to goad outside powers into massive wars with each other! This is why they've attacked everyone - the US, France, Russia, and all the major Arab nations. Everyone is off fighting in Syria, and not as a unified front, but a bunch of independent powers making independent alliances and jockeying for position. During a recent presidential debate, Rand Paul wisely asked the question, "Are you ready to shoot down Russian planes?" (note: I'm not a Rand Paul supporter. I just thought he was spot-on with this.) If the US creates a no-fly zone while Russia wants to do bombing runs in it, we could have a situation where American and Russian planes are in direct combat. There's a non-zero chance that this could lead to nuclear war and the destruction of the West as we know it. And we've already had the first taste of it, with NATO member Turkey shooting down a Russian plane. If I wanted to destroy the West, that's exactly what I'd do - provoke a war between the US and Russia with those giant Cold War nuclear arsenals. And that makes me think Daesh is by far the most sophisticated and dangerous enemy we've seen since the Nazis.
- wdewind 11y ago
  > I find Daesh far scarier than other Islamic fundamentalist movements because their techniques are more sophisticated and their aim is much higher. Daesh are basically the same people with the same goals as the other Islamic fundamentalist movements you are familiar with. Read the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_...
  - beat 11y ago
    That's like saying Twitter is the same as Google, just because principal founders came from Google.
Florin_Andrei 11y ago
The left claims ISIS happened because of geopolitical bullying that the West did in that area for about a century now. The right claims ISIS happened because they are religious nutjobs fundamentally opposed to western values. I think it's not either / or. I think it's a messy situation with a complicated causal web. It's more like all of the above. You get Picot / Sykes after WWI to stir up trouble in the region. And the creation of an artificial state after WWII in the region, which the West keeps sponsoring so that they dominate the area militarily. And things like the CIA coup to remove Mosaddegh from office in Iran, who ended up being replaced with a theocracy. And the relentless pressure and meddling from the West, for the purpose of maintaining an oil supply. And then you get a bunch of religious nutjobs ruling various places in the area. And a religion which seems to have a particularly "robust" attitude towards "holy wars". And then throw in the mix some climate shifts that knock out harvests and upset the price of food staples. And maybe the economists are right, too, and vast inequalities of all sorts in the area just made everything else worse. If any one of the factors mentioned above was acting in isolation, nothing would have happened. But the stack, as you see, is pretty thick, and I guess something broke somewhere. It's all of the above. It's not one single, isolated reason.
intopieces 11y ago
The mistake you're making in your analogy is comparing a group of people to a single person. ISIS is not one united front, and most of the people who actually fight -- not the leaders making videos, but the people doing the killing -- do so for much less grandiose reasons. Casting the rise of ISIS as a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil struggle allows some very clever politicians to have their way: torture some folks, spy on citizens. But if we look deeper at the situation, we'll see that motivations are more complex. In doing so, however, we (the West) must confront our role in the situation. "For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. 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.” [0] [0]http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/ http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte...
luizparreira 11y ago
You are miss understanding what he meant. I don't think he meant to explain the reasoning used by the attackers, he is however trying to understand what caused all these people to start killing in the first place. ISIS surely feeds on religion, but the root cause of the problem is not only religion, just as the root cause of the Crusades wasn't.
Mikeb85 11y ago
> Finally, is there anywhere to find the original article by Piketty in English? Pretty much everything Piketty writes, is originally written in French. He's French, after all...
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
There can be multiple real counterfactuals based on multiple contributing causal factors.

mtsr 11y ago

It just so happens that Piketty is French. Maybe you can find a translation somewhere, though.

criley2 11y ago

"I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth." Because they're proven masters at propaganda and messaging. To take prop at face value is the definition of naive. "ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia." That's their justification for their actions, not the reason. Come on. Recruiting for ISIS pays $5000 - $10000 per successful recruit. If their true motivation is purely religious, if religion is the INCENTIVE, then why incentivize people with lump sumps larger than yearly income from honest work? ISIS represents a way out of poverty, at least, that's how they sell it in recruiting. "When someone shoots up a Planned Parenthood, however, he doesn't even have to make a public statement and the same people are quick to blame Christian beliefs or rhetoric and immediately accept the ideological reason for the violence." We call that quid pro quo, and yes, it's intentional. If Islam itself is responsible for the actions of a minority of a minority, then it stands to reason that Christianity itself is responsible for the actions of a minority of a minority. So long as conservatives blame Islam in general for ISIS, we will blame Christianity in general for Westboro Baptist, for Clinic Terrorists, for Jehovah Witness child negligence murder, etc. "Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States?" We do, often, we bemoan the war against education (ignorance as pride) and growing wealth inequality for social tension and violence both here in America and worldwide.

forrestthewoods 11y ago
Ah. People are in poverty and to get out of poverty they blow themselves up in a public place such that they can murder a bunch of innocent civilians in the process. Got it. Good to know.
- criley2 11y ago
  If your country was destroyed, there was no jobs, you had no money, no food, your home was crumbling, your siblings starving, your parents helpless... and you were 17 and powerless, and someone offered you $10,000 to do it... would you? Would you do something terrible to ensure that your family got a huge payday that would put food on their table for potentially years?
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    No. No I would not murder dozens of innocent people. There's a lot of poverty in the world and the vast majority of the impoverished do not commit such atrocities.
    - criley2 11y ago
      "no I wouldn't" I guess it was too much to ask you to walk a mile in their shoes, because we internet dwelling rich folk literally cannot comprehend poverty on this level, of watching your family die before your eyes as a teenager. "vast majority of the impoverished do not commit such atrocities." The vast majority don't have a years pay untaxed offered, never have to make the choice. Easy to say they won't do something when they have no option to do it. Then again, with how INCREDIBLY SUCCESSFUL ISIS has been at recruiting perhaps you need to reevaluate your opinion of how the impoverished of the world behave when given opportunity. Many impoverished will loot during riots or engage in widespread gang violence in cities, they'll overthrow secular governments in favor of Islamic ones in the Arab Spring, they'll take the money and kill for ISIS. I think people need to be more honest and realize that true destitution means they don't have to play within the bounds of economic and moral systems. We're controlled by our jobs and our money, and if we have neither, we will do whatever is necessary to provide for ourselves and our families, including hurting people "from other tribes".

bosdev 11y ago

> Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States? I do. I think the Planned Parenthood shooting is due to a combination of mental illness and lack of education. I don't think it really matters which crazy ideology you pick, you can use it to justify your actions. And if the crazy, uneducated, people weren't shooting up a Planned Parenthood, they would be shooting up a theater, or a school, or any number of other places. The solution is to educate kids and to treat the mentally ill. Why does this tiny group of Muslims commit hate crimes, while the vast majority do not? Piketty thinks it's income inequality, what's your explanation?

jules 11y ago
If it's income inequality, then why are most terrorists highly educated and relatively well off?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > If it's income inequality, then why are most terrorists highly educated and relatively well off? As I understand it, Middle Eastern terrorists are disproportionately from the thin and relatively insecure middle class, neither the oligarchs nor the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. I don't think this is at all inconsistent with income inequality being a major contributing factor, though its not as simple as personal poverty being a driving factor.
  - jules 11y ago
    At the very least that data does not really fit the theory. At some point you have to consider that when the facts do not fit the theory perhaps the theory is wrong, rather than to try to spin the facts in such a way that they fit the theory in a weird way. I think some people are too attached to a particular theory being true, rather than finding out the right theory.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago

jlangenauer 11y ago

It's not a case of believing what's coming out of ISIS' mouth - most people, even on the Left you decry, do. The question is why, when they utter this stuff, do so many people listen?

colordrops 11y ago

To address your analogy, proponents of Planned Parenthood aren't killing pro-lifers en mass using robots and tacitly supporting the most extreme pro-lifers to address a third enemy. The analogy doesn't work at all.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

Why would I believe their reasons? If there is one thing I've learned in life, it's that people don't know why they do many (or even any) of the things they do. They do them for reasons unknown to themselves, and then afterward, supposing there is demand, they fabricate reasons. Not lies necessarily, more like their "best guess" as to why they did it. When the judge asks the teenager why he microwaved a live hamster and the teenager says "I don't know" he's not only being honest but actually insightful. And because society demands reasons for every action, most children soon learn that "I don't know" is an unacceptable answer. So no, I don't believe what comes out of ISIS's mouth(s) regarding why they do these things. I'm not sure why you do either, and it's a fact that neither do you.

mikeash 11y ago

Things don't have a single cause. "ISIS grew out of staggeringly unequal distribution of Mideast oil wealth" and "ISIS is motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam" are able to coexist perfectly well. Do you have any examples of "the same people" being inconsistent here? Because usually when people complain about inconsistency like this, it's actually different people being mentally categorized together, not actually the same people.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Last sentence is an excellent point. This is a group of groups of groups. Acting like ISIS is one entity with one set of attributes is like claiming the same for the workforce of a city. They're one thing in one way with similar goals, direction, and activities but substantially different in other ways.
notacoward 11y ago
Unbelievably well stated. Kudos. (And I get downvoted for saying something nice? Some people have way too much invested in the opposing POV, and way too little courage.)
- scott_karana 11y ago
  > And I get downvoted for saying something nice? Some HN (and possibly its rules) frowns on "+1" or "I agree" style posts that don't add additional content to a discussion, and people will sometimes downvote you accordingly. Hopefully that's all that the downvoting was...

pizza 11y ago

You're thinking of ISIS' intent, whereas Piketty's argument is about the circumstances that allow one entity to acquire so much power.

tdkl 11y ago

They aren't allowed to say that they're selling oil to Turkey to pay their "holy fighters" while being kickstarted by USA and Saudi Arabia.

n7c3c1 11y ago

Because the left in the West, more than being attacked by terrorists, is afraid of being seen as politically incorrect.

kohanz 11y ago

There's a difference between the stated motive of ISIS and what enables them to exist and grow. I have a hard time believing that they can be so effective in their recruitment efforts with a message based entirely on an interpretation of an old book. It is more plausible to me that they prey on desperate, mentally unwell, and disaffected people to join their cause.

CM30 11y ago
Wait, you have a hard time believing they can be so recruitment with a message based on an interpretation of an old book? More than 2000 years of human history and religion shows that an awful lot of things (both positive and negative for the world) have come from religion, based almost entirely on old books and interpretations. The supposed word of a supposedly all knowing/powerful deity is enough inspiration for an awful lot of people.
jules 11y ago
This is simply false. Most terrorists are highly educated. The 9/11 terrorists had a college education, some had PhD's.
- CM30 11y ago
  Being educated does not mean you're above believing in bullshit. There are a lot of highly educated people with a college education or a PhD who believe him ghosts, crop circles, bigfoot, alien abductions, the 'dangers' of GM food, conspiracy theories or think that vaccines cause autism. That doesn't make those beliefs more plausible, regardless of if a certain amount of smart people believe in them. Similarly, it doesn't shield people from religious extremism, or any other form of extreme view for that matter. People are irrational, some lack critical thinking skills (and everyone forgets to use them at least some of time). You don't become a Vulcan the minute you get through college.
  - jules 11y ago
    Exactly. This is not about desperate, mentally unwell, and disaffected people, but about people who sincerely think that the best thing for this world is to implement the Qur'an to the last letter. You can be a rocket scientist and a religious idiot at the same time.

rgbrgb 11y ago

I won't pretend to know why everything is so fucked right now but I will make 2 points: 1) In general, the people actually doing the killings are far removed from the organization's leadership. Here's an interesting piece on individual Isis fighters: http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/ http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte... 2) Usually when someone is upset, they're very bad at articulating the actual thing that is upsetting them. Often when someone is upset, they'll say (and think) it's about something that is actually unrelated but happened to come right before the outburst of pent up frustration. To me, Islamism is a suspiciously rational explanation for completely irrational violence. Islam's pretty old, the book hasn't changed, but we're seeing a big spike in coordinated terror against civilians in the last couple years.

iofj 11y ago
2) is not true. Violence committed because of islam has been pretty steady since the end of WW1 and was much higher before that.
- jules 11y ago
  No, it has increased a lot. This is a Dutch newspaper, but you should be able to read the graphs: http://static1.volkskrant.nl/static/nmc/red/frameset/2015/terrorismecijfers/ http://static1.volkskrant.nl/static/nmc/red/frameset/2015/te...
  - iofj 11y ago
    This is over a short period and doesn't count stuff like the Sudanese "civil war" muslim raids on Southern villages, which would have made that graph look like a rounding error.

danans 11y ago

There is no reason why both Piketty's and ISIS' rationale can't both be true. ISIS's eschatological religious propaganda wouldn't have nearly the resonance and recruiting power it does if it weren't for the current state of political and economic inequality in the middle east. Also, while the Planned Parenthood shootings are tragic, they are not widespread and frequent enough to be attributed to an aggregate measure such as income inequality. Edit: removed my comment about how we'd have to have Christian armies rising in the US to have a situation comparable to ISIS. Apparently that rubbed some the wrong way.

pyrocat 11y ago

Maybe because the Planned Parenthood shooter specifically mentioned "no more baby parts"? And Planned Parenthood has been HEAVILY featured in the media this last year, falsely painted by the christian right as a baby-killing organization?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Brakenshire 11y ago

ISIS is a fundamentalist millenarian dead cult making up some thousands of people, the question and the issue is why they haven't been run out of the areas where they operate by the ordinary people that live there, and their existing power groups. It is completely uncontroversial that ISIS are substantially tapping into existing and real sectarian grievances in the area. In Syria, that is down to a lack of development in rural Sunnis areas, and human rights abuses by the Shia-led regime. In Iraq, it is down to the loss of power of Sunni groups after the fall of Saddam, and the transition in power and patronage towards the Shia majority. Just saying over and over again that ISIS is evil is just repeating an obvious truth, the question is how do explain their success, and how do you undercut their power base, and a substantial part of that is to do with the allocation of money and power for the Sunni areas in Syria and Iraq.

coffeevradar 11y ago

Here's Le Monde's English translation: http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/11/24/clamping-down-with-law-and-order-will-not-be-enough/ http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/11/24/clamping-down-with...

pille 11y ago

Since you kind of elided it, their stated reason for killing is more or less "because you're not Muslim". We could take it at face value, but there's nothing useful you can do with that information. What would be useful is to know how so many people get to that place. What are the conditions that radicalized thousands to the point where they are willing to kill others just for being less Muslim than they see themselves? I think the Post's use of the word 'blame' is meant to be provocative. Western powers obviously aren't scheming to create ISIS with wealth inequality, and improved wealth distribution obviously won't inspire ISIS to lay down their weapons. But if that inequality really is a cause, it's worth trying to fix it if you want to head off the next manifestation of ISIS.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth. Accepting it doesn't really answer much. > ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia. Yes, and if we accept this, we are faced with the question of what makes particular people in particular times and places likely to accept and act on messages like this, and what circumstances enable them to be successful when they do. Daesh isn't the only group to promote an ideology like this based on interpretation of some ancient religious text (nor is the phenomenon of groups trying, or even succeeding, in doing that limited to the Middle East, or the Islamic world, nor are the Quran the only text which has been used in this role.) Nor, for that matter, was Daesh (though it had a different name!) new to this when they first started achieving real success -- they had similar goals and interpretation of Islam before they became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, when they were known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, and when they rejected their affiliation with al-Qaeda to style themselves first as "the Islamic State in Iraq", then "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant", and finally "the Islamic State". > When someone shoots up a Planned Parenthood, however, he doesn't even have to make a public statement and the same people are quick to blame Christian beliefs or rhetoric and immediately accept the ideological reason for the violence. Women's health clinic attacks by violent religious extremists with an overt religious motivation are a recurring pattern in the US; assuming that another such attack is part of that pattern rather than breaking with it is not exactly a giant leap. In any case, the ideology behind the attack and the conditions which made the attacker susceptible to adopting that ideology are distinct issues. > Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States? Actually, lots of people on the left -- the only people who generally acknowledge the overt ideological motivation of violence of Christian religious extremists -- point to social factors like income inequality and persistent poverty as among the factors that make people susceptible to that extremism (as well as pointing to deliberate acts by certain political elites to fan that extremism and channel it for political ends as contributing to the uptake of the extremism.) These positions are complementary, rather than incompatible.

beat 11y ago

Rudimentary talk-radio analysis aside... I find Daesh far scarier than other Islamic fundamentalist movements because their techniques are more sophisticated and their aim is much higher. The "they're killing us!" argument is so silly... terror attacks are to stir western nations into violent action, not to actually significantly injure us. And it works - far too many Americans and Europeans live and act politically in abject terror of very low-impact, unlikely events. What scares me about Daesh, though, is that I think they're trying to goad outside powers into massive wars with each other! This is why they've attacked everyone - the US, France, Russia, and all the major Arab nations. Everyone is off fighting in Syria, and not as a unified front, but a bunch of independent powers making independent alliances and jockeying for position. During a recent presidential debate, Rand Paul wisely asked the question, "Are you ready to shoot down Russian planes?" (note: I'm not a Rand Paul supporter. I just thought he was spot-on with this.) If the US creates a no-fly zone while Russia wants to do bombing runs in it, we could have a situation where American and Russian planes are in direct combat. There's a non-zero chance that this could lead to nuclear war and the destruction of the West as we know it. And we've already had the first taste of it, with NATO member Turkey shooting down a Russian plane. If I wanted to destroy the West, that's exactly what I'd do - provoke a war between the US and Russia with those giant Cold War nuclear arsenals. And that makes me think Daesh is by far the most sophisticated and dangerous enemy we've seen since the Nazis.

wdewind 11y ago
> I find Daesh far scarier than other Islamic fundamentalist movements because their techniques are more sophisticated and their aim is much higher. Daesh are basically the same people with the same goals as the other Islamic fundamentalist movements you are familiar with. Read the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_...
- beat 11y ago
  That's like saying Twitter is the same as Google, just because principal founders came from Google.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

The left claims ISIS happened because of geopolitical bullying that the West did in that area for about a century now. The right claims ISIS happened because they are religious nutjobs fundamentally opposed to western values. I think it's not either / or. I think it's a messy situation with a complicated causal web. It's more like all of the above. You get Picot / Sykes after WWI to stir up trouble in the region. And the creation of an artificial state after WWII in the region, which the West keeps sponsoring so that they dominate the area militarily. And things like the CIA coup to remove Mosaddegh from office in Iran, who ended up being replaced with a theocracy. And the relentless pressure and meddling from the West, for the purpose of maintaining an oil supply. And then you get a bunch of religious nutjobs ruling various places in the area. And a religion which seems to have a particularly "robust" attitude towards "holy wars". And then throw in the mix some climate shifts that knock out harvests and upset the price of food staples. And maybe the economists are right, too, and vast inequalities of all sorts in the area just made everything else worse. If any one of the factors mentioned above was acting in isolation, nothing would have happened. But the stack, as you see, is pretty thick, and I guess something broke somewhere. It's all of the above. It's not one single, isolated reason.

intopieces 11y ago

The mistake you're making in your analogy is comparing a group of people to a single person. ISIS is not one united front, and most of the people who actually fight -- not the leaders making videos, but the people doing the killing -- do so for much less grandiose reasons. Casting the rise of ISIS as a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil struggle allows some very clever politicians to have their way: torture some folks, spy on citizens. But if we look deeper at the situation, we'll see that motivations are more complex. In doing so, however, we (the West) must confront our role in the situation. "For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. 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.” [0] [0]http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/ http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte...

luizparreira 11y ago

You are miss understanding what he meant. I don't think he meant to explain the reasoning used by the attackers, he is however trying to understand what caused all these people to start killing in the first place. ISIS surely feeds on religion, but the root cause of the problem is not only religion, just as the root cause of the Crusades wasn't.

Mikeb85 11y ago

> Finally, is there anywhere to find the original article by Piketty in English? Pretty much everything Piketty writes, is originally written in French. He's French, after all...

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

There can be multiple real counterfactuals based on multiple contributing causal factors.