6 ms·

What do many terrorists have in common? They abuse women

25 points by olvy0 5y ago

jjgreen 5y ago
This seems to me to be rather worrying, conceptually. "Abuse of women" is (I would hope) something we can agree on, it's not subjective (except possibly for some psychopath abusers). But "terrorism" is demonstrably subjective, one day a freedom fighter, the next day a terrorist; Hamas being a terrorist organisation in the US but not in Norway. Identifying the two risks reducing "abuse of women" to being just a point of view.
- mam3 5y ago
  Yeah the article makes no sense
- macintux 5y ago
  Hm, I see it the other way around. To me, the "slippery slope" here is that men who repeatedly commit domestic violence could be labeled terrorists. And, frankly, I'm ok with that.
  - LightG 5y ago
    Yes, 'domestic terrorist' could take on an extended meaning, and rightfully in this case. (edit: judging by the downvotes, a decent amount of sympathy on HN for those engaged in domestic violence. Noted).
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    Why? What does that serve other than to ruin the word? One of the scariest things happening right now in a post-intellectual America is that words don’t have meaning anymore. It’s all just “good” or “bad”, “our team” or “your team”. It’s how a group that does manifestly unpatriotic things gets by calling themselves patriots with a straight face. I’m not sure calling abusive criminals “terrorists” does a single good thing.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      Calling someone who abuses women to rule them by fear a "terrorist" doesn't sound like a stretch to me. In contrast, the media calling anyone attacking a cop or a military officer a "terrorist" sounds like way more of a stretch, and much closer to Nazi Germany's understanding of the word where anything the government (NOT the people) feared was labeled a terrorist.
  - mountainb 5y ago
    Spend some time around defense attorneys and the types of people who constantly get in trouble for domestics. This would just be one of the many other things politicians have foisted on the poor (who have less self-control, else they would not be poor) that put them into continual conflict with the legal system long after they have served their prison sentences. If you want domestics to go to jail for 50 years, change the statutes so that there's mandatory minimums of 50 years in prison. Or life, who cares? The chickenshit stuff of larding lifelong restrictions on convicts related to domestic abuse results in the unending harrying of poor bums with complex post-sentencing requirements involving guns, cars, etc. that keeps lawyers busy, cops doing make-work, and poor people poor. Adding terrorism nonsense to the mix will just encourage the FBI to employ thousands of CIs to induce working class couples to cheat on one another with their catfished agents to get one or both to commit 'terrorism' to lock them up.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Terrorism is rule by fear. Liberation struggles inspire fear in those that rule, not among the ruled classes. Imagine yourself in nazi germany, would you be terrorized by the resistance movement blowing up trains and assassinating cops/officers? Or would you be terrorized by the political police? The word terrorism has a nebulous meaning. Historically, it could refer to 19th anarchist bombers blowing up bourgeois cafés and police stations, which arguably nobody in the general population fears (and back in the days of the propaganda of the deed, had in fact a lot of popular support). Or it can mean takfirist islam like Daech or Al Qaeda, considering the general population is not pure enough and mass assassinations are necessary to open its eyes... which is scary as fuck for anyone and everyone. In that sense, studying the balance of power is important in order to label (or not) a movement a terrorist. Even when i disagree with its method, i will never label a resistance movement "terrorists", because that's precisely what the nazis did and what their ideological followers are still doing today in regards to palestinian/kurdish/indigenous resistance, anarchists and eco-warriors defending land against industry, racial minority groups mounting armed self-defense groups, etc..
  - jjgreen 5y ago
    Imagine yourself in nazi germany, would you be terrorized by the resistance movement blowing up trains and assassinating cops/officers? Or would you be terrorized by the political police? If I were a Nazi in Nazi Germany, then very much the former. Freedom fighters are the irregular military forces I support, terrorists are those that I don't.
- ParoxysmalVigor 5y ago
  Legal status is just an international politics bargaining chip and should not be considered a replacement for semantics. Terrorism - the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
roenxi 5y ago
I really don't see what is newsworthy here. "People who think violence might be able to solve problems use violence in attempt to solve their problems". It would be rather weird if the people plotting violent acts thought discourse and debate were the best tools to effect change.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  Well there is the part where people in charge of government bodies specifically dealing with terrorism didn't bother to check for this correlation before: > I thought these cases challenged conventional wisdom about terrorism, which holds that it is all about ideology. (...) When I raised this with the authorities, however, I encountered scepticism and disbelief. I think that's quite a significant oversight, and given the effort it took to convince them to correct that oversight a dismissive reply suggesting this is obvious seems inappropriate in context. The point is that violence against women is often ignored, and the flippant replies here are yet another confirmation of that.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Considering the number of terrorists, and the number of domestic violence case, this won't really help with finding them.
  - yodelshady 5y ago
    It's probably quite a good correlation. Freakonomics covered the idea "why suicide bombers should buy life insurance" - because, well, most don't and a decent profiling tool will notice that. Emotionally-driven behaviour is typically harder to conceal.
- bArray 5y ago
  Yep. The big brains at the Guardian figured out that people willing to dehumanize large groups of people will also do so to their partners... The article is so dumb it actually hurts to read, no wonder it was an opinion piece.
automatic6131 5y ago
I'm not super surprised that the people want to achieve political aims with violence would also use violence to achieve personal aims.
mam3 5y ago
"islamic guys, extreme right guys and incels all share a bunch of misogyny and violence" Water is wet but its a "groundbraking research"
- xiphias2 5y ago
  I was involuntary celibate until I was 23 (16 years ago): I was very good at math and science, but I wasn't able to make relationships with women. Still, I was very far from being a violent person (even though I was very frustrated because of my lack of ability to connect with other people), in fact whenever I was in a threat, I ran away, and never started a fight. It's very dangerous to put incels (a third of young American men) in the same group as extremists. https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/young-american-men-are-having-less-sex https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/young-american-men-are-hav...
  - reverend_gonzo 5y ago
    There is a big difference between those you are involuntarily celibate because they lack the social skills and those who identify with the incel subculture. The culture, at its base, is toxic to humanity.
    - xiphias2 5y ago
      I agree, but the parent comment wrote incels, and not those who identify with the incel subculture that creates lots of lies. HN is great, because it attracts people who understand different meanings of the same word, but much of media tries to wash them together.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    Yeah I don't understand why incels are seen as evil. Young men that have limited success with women don't always hate women they long for a deep meaningful relationship like everyone else. Most will never turn violent. I get that it's bad for society to have large numbers of incels but it weird how unsuccessful men are now assumed to be woman haters.
  - 5y ago
illuminati1911 5y ago
This probably has nothing to do with ”abusing women”, but it’s just generally about being a violent individual.
- dathinab 5y ago
  Yes, it's more about "abusing humans in all kinds of ways". Through the definition of terrorist is slippery slope and you will find enough terrorists which "don't abuse woman". I mean ones person freedom fighter is another persons terrorist and maybe another countries secret agent...
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    The word terrorist didn't seem to have a definition that everybody agrees on. The important part for me is who is targeted. If you are targeting civilians, you are a terrorist. If you are attacking a legit military target you are not.
Zababa 5y ago
> Last month a 19-year-old man was convicted of the murders of two sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, in north London. At his trial, it emerged that Danyal Hussein had been referred to Prevent in 2017 after using school computers to access far-right material. He appeared in front of a Channel panel, the statutory body that assesses the risk posed by individuals, but was discharged a few months later with no continuing concerns in relation to extremism or terrorism. Yet Hussein would later draw up a “contract” with a “demon” in which he promised to kill six women – and only women – in six months in return for winning the lottery. He refused to give detectives his passwords, so it is impossible to confirm a suspicion that he may have accessed incel sites on the web. But in a note that echoes the incel obsession with not feeling sufficiently attractive to women, he pledged to “offer some blood” in exchange for making a girl fall in love with him. From https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-57722035 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-57722035 > Inside they found a contract that Hussein, now 19, believed he had drawn up with a demon. In large, childish handwriting, he promised to "perform a minimum of six sacrifices every six months for as long as I am free and physically capable". The agreement was headed, "for the mighty king Lucifuge Rofocale" who, according to some Satanic cults, is the demon in charge of hell's government and treasury. In exchange Hussein would win the Mega Millions Super Jackpot and "receive fruitful rewards" including "wealth and power". At the bottom Hussein had signed his forename in his own blood. There was a space - left unsigned - for the demon to leave his mark. I think his misogyny might be a symptom of something deeper here.
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
I hate media for research like this. They have a list of things which according to them are bad and could be labelled together according to their political orientation. This is filled with "As I expected, I found this". Is there any point in time that the religion angle came into picture. Can you demonstrate the same for non Muslim terrorist, because whoever comes to mind in this category lived separate life. Not saying all Muslim are abuser, but they certainly create stricter life for females.
- WinstonSmith84 5y ago
  yep. This reminds me this https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations such as US suicide correlated to US spending on science.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    How is that related?
- loopz 5y ago
  Knowing the correlation, it may make it easier to understand the reasons behind and how people get recruited into violent cults. If it doesn't generalize well, it may be a dead end though.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > demonstrate the same for non Muslim terrorist Yes of course the correlation between patriarchal control and depersonalized violence (terrorism) is established well beyond islam. It's a fact that has been pointed out time and time again by feminist scholars and activists. For example, the Montreal Polytechnique massacre was downplayed/depoliticized by the media as the work of deranged madman, but has long been understood by more pointy spirits to be a political act of femicide. Other examples of this correlation are given in Contrapoint's popular education video about incels, which you can find on Youtube and i cannot recommend enough to understand that mindset. > Muslim (...) certainly create stricter life for females Source? Here in France, i don't know of any evidence that patriarchal control is stricter/stronger in muslims than in atheists/jews/christians/hindus/etc. In fact, it is possible it would be less prevalent with muslims, because muslim expressions of patriarchy are more scrutinized/opposed than the presentable white-rapist-in-a-suit variant that occupies every government, police station and corporation here in the global north. Patriarchy was established long before islam was a thing, and is one of the oldest and most insidious systems of domination. Your statement linking islam specifically to patriarchy seems based on anecdotal data, just like i could produce anecdotal data of muslim feminists proudly dismantling patriarchy.
nix23 5y ago
Let's talk first about the definition of a terrorist please?
mellosouls 5y ago
The Guardian is always finding angles to push the "women as victims" line, whatever the actual story. That's not to say there isn't truth to it in this case, or there aren't battles still to be fought for women's rights but ironically I think its constant search for this sort of spin is weirdly paternalistic.
southerntofu 5y ago
On a less serious note, it reminds me of this comic strip: https://i.imgur.com/pOVHqmC.png https://i.imgur.com/pOVHqmC.png
DaveExeter 5y ago
What do many police officers have in common? They abuse women.
sys_64738 5y ago
What do many politicians and actors have in common?

25 points by olvy0 5y ago

This seems to me to be rather worrying, conceptually. "Abuse of women" is (I would hope) something we can agree on, it's not subjective (except possibly for some psychopath abusers). But "terrorism" is demonstrably subjective, one day a freedom fighter, the next day a terrorist; Hamas being a terrorist organisation in the US but not in Norway. Identifying the two risks reducing "abuse of women" to being just a point of view.

mam3 5y ago
Yeah the article makes no sense
macintux 5y ago
Hm, I see it the other way around. To me, the "slippery slope" here is that men who repeatedly commit domestic violence could be labeled terrorists. And, frankly, I'm ok with that.
- LightG 5y ago
  Yes, 'domestic terrorist' could take on an extended meaning, and rightfully in this case. (edit: judging by the downvotes, a decent amount of sympathy on HN for those engaged in domestic violence. Noted).
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  Why? What does that serve other than to ruin the word? One of the scariest things happening right now in a post-intellectual America is that words don’t have meaning anymore. It’s all just “good” or “bad”, “our team” or “your team”. It’s how a group that does manifestly unpatriotic things gets by calling themselves patriots with a straight face. I’m not sure calling abusive criminals “terrorists” does a single good thing.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Calling someone who abuses women to rule them by fear a "terrorist" doesn't sound like a stretch to me. In contrast, the media calling anyone attacking a cop or a military officer a "terrorist" sounds like way more of a stretch, and much closer to Nazi Germany's understanding of the word where anything the government (NOT the people) feared was labeled a terrorist.
- mountainb 5y ago
  Spend some time around defense attorneys and the types of people who constantly get in trouble for domestics. This would just be one of the many other things politicians have foisted on the poor (who have less self-control, else they would not be poor) that put them into continual conflict with the legal system long after they have served their prison sentences. If you want domestics to go to jail for 50 years, change the statutes so that there's mandatory minimums of 50 years in prison. Or life, who cares? The chickenshit stuff of larding lifelong restrictions on convicts related to domestic abuse results in the unending harrying of poor bums with complex post-sentencing requirements involving guns, cars, etc. that keeps lawyers busy, cops doing make-work, and poor people poor. Adding terrorism nonsense to the mix will just encourage the FBI to employ thousands of CIs to induce working class couples to cheat on one another with their catfished agents to get one or both to commit 'terrorism' to lock them up.
southerntofu 5y ago
Terrorism is rule by fear. Liberation struggles inspire fear in those that rule, not among the ruled classes. Imagine yourself in nazi germany, would you be terrorized by the resistance movement blowing up trains and assassinating cops/officers? Or would you be terrorized by the political police? The word terrorism has a nebulous meaning. Historically, it could refer to 19th anarchist bombers blowing up bourgeois cafés and police stations, which arguably nobody in the general population fears (and back in the days of the propaganda of the deed, had in fact a lot of popular support). Or it can mean takfirist islam like Daech or Al Qaeda, considering the general population is not pure enough and mass assassinations are necessary to open its eyes... which is scary as fuck for anyone and everyone. In that sense, studying the balance of power is important in order to label (or not) a movement a terrorist. Even when i disagree with its method, i will never label a resistance movement "terrorists", because that's precisely what the nazis did and what their ideological followers are still doing today in regards to palestinian/kurdish/indigenous resistance, anarchists and eco-warriors defending land against industry, racial minority groups mounting armed self-defense groups, etc..
- jjgreen 5y ago
  Imagine yourself in nazi germany, would you be terrorized by the resistance movement blowing up trains and assassinating cops/officers? Or would you be terrorized by the political police? If I were a Nazi in Nazi Germany, then very much the former. Freedom fighters are the irregular military forces I support, terrorists are those that I don't.
ParoxysmalVigor 5y ago
Legal status is just an international politics bargaining chip and should not be considered a replacement for semantics. Terrorism - the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

roenxi 5y ago

I really don't see what is newsworthy here. "People who think violence might be able to solve problems use violence in attempt to solve their problems". It would be rather weird if the people plotting violent acts thought discourse and debate were the best tools to effect change.

vanderZwan 5y ago
Well there is the part where people in charge of government bodies specifically dealing with terrorism didn't bother to check for this correlation before: > I thought these cases challenged conventional wisdom about terrorism, which holds that it is all about ideology. (...) When I raised this with the authorities, however, I encountered scepticism and disbelief. I think that's quite a significant oversight, and given the effort it took to convince them to correct that oversight a dismissive reply suggesting this is obvious seems inappropriate in context. The point is that violence against women is often ignored, and the flippant replies here are yet another confirmation of that.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Considering the number of terrorists, and the number of domestic violence case, this won't really help with finding them.
- yodelshady 5y ago
  It's probably quite a good correlation. Freakonomics covered the idea "why suicide bombers should buy life insurance" - because, well, most don't and a decent profiling tool will notice that. Emotionally-driven behaviour is typically harder to conceal.
bArray 5y ago
Yep. The big brains at the Guardian figured out that people willing to dehumanize large groups of people will also do so to their partners... The article is so dumb it actually hurts to read, no wonder it was an opinion piece.

automatic6131 5y ago

I'm not super surprised that the people want to achieve political aims with violence would also use violence to achieve personal aims.

mam3 5y ago

"islamic guys, extreme right guys and incels all share a bunch of misogyny and violence" Water is wet but its a "groundbraking research"

xiphias2 5y ago
I was involuntary celibate until I was 23 (16 years ago): I was very good at math and science, but I wasn't able to make relationships with women. Still, I was very far from being a violent person (even though I was very frustrated because of my lack of ability to connect with other people), in fact whenever I was in a threat, I ran away, and never started a fight. It's very dangerous to put incels (a third of young American men) in the same group as extremists. https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/young-american-men-are-having-less-sex https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/young-american-men-are-hav...
- reverend_gonzo 5y ago
  There is a big difference between those you are involuntarily celibate because they lack the social skills and those who identify with the incel subculture. The culture, at its base, is toxic to humanity.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    I agree, but the parent comment wrote incels, and not those who identify with the incel subculture that creates lots of lies. HN is great, because it attracts people who understand different meanings of the same word, but much of media tries to wash them together.
- xupybd 5y ago
  Yeah I don't understand why incels are seen as evil. Young men that have limited success with women don't always hate women they long for a deep meaningful relationship like everyone else. Most will never turn violent. I get that it's bad for society to have large numbers of incels but it weird how unsuccessful men are now assumed to be woman haters.
- 5y ago

illuminati1911 5y ago

This probably has nothing to do with ”abusing women”, but it’s just generally about being a violent individual.

dathinab 5y ago
Yes, it's more about "abusing humans in all kinds of ways". Through the definition of terrorist is slippery slope and you will find enough terrorists which "don't abuse woman". I mean ones person freedom fighter is another persons terrorist and maybe another countries secret agent...
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  The word terrorist didn't seem to have a definition that everybody agrees on. The important part for me is who is targeted. If you are targeting civilians, you are a terrorist. If you are attacking a legit military target you are not.

Zababa 5y ago

> Last month a 19-year-old man was convicted of the murders of two sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, in north London. At his trial, it emerged that Danyal Hussein had been referred to Prevent in 2017 after using school computers to access far-right material. He appeared in front of a Channel panel, the statutory body that assesses the risk posed by individuals, but was discharged a few months later with no continuing concerns in relation to extremism or terrorism. Yet Hussein would later draw up a “contract” with a “demon” in which he promised to kill six women – and only women – in six months in return for winning the lottery. He refused to give detectives his passwords, so it is impossible to confirm a suspicion that he may have accessed incel sites on the web. But in a note that echoes the incel obsession with not feeling sufficiently attractive to women, he pledged to “offer some blood” in exchange for making a girl fall in love with him. From https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-57722035 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-57722035 > Inside they found a contract that Hussein, now 19, believed he had drawn up with a demon. In large, childish handwriting, he promised to "perform a minimum of six sacrifices every six months for as long as I am free and physically capable". The agreement was headed, "for the mighty king Lucifuge Rofocale" who, according to some Satanic cults, is the demon in charge of hell's government and treasury. In exchange Hussein would win the Mega Millions Super Jackpot and "receive fruitful rewards" including "wealth and power". At the bottom Hussein had signed his forename in his own blood. There was a space - left unsigned - for the demon to leave his mark. I think his misogyny might be a symptom of something deeper here.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago

I hate media for research like this. They have a list of things which according to them are bad and could be labelled together according to their political orientation. This is filled with "As I expected, I found this". Is there any point in time that the religion angle came into picture. Can you demonstrate the same for non Muslim terrorist, because whoever comes to mind in this category lived separate life. Not saying all Muslim are abuser, but they certainly create stricter life for females.

WinstonSmith84 5y ago
yep. This reminds me this https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations such as US suicide correlated to US spending on science.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  How is that related?
loopz 5y ago
Knowing the correlation, it may make it easier to understand the reasons behind and how people get recruited into violent cults. If it doesn't generalize well, it may be a dead end though.
southerntofu 5y ago
> demonstrate the same for non Muslim terrorist Yes of course the correlation between patriarchal control and depersonalized violence (terrorism) is established well beyond islam. It's a fact that has been pointed out time and time again by feminist scholars and activists. For example, the Montreal Polytechnique massacre was downplayed/depoliticized by the media as the work of deranged madman, but has long been understood by more pointy spirits to be a political act of femicide. Other examples of this correlation are given in Contrapoint's popular education video about incels, which you can find on Youtube and i cannot recommend enough to understand that mindset. > Muslim (...) certainly create stricter life for females Source? Here in France, i don't know of any evidence that patriarchal control is stricter/stronger in muslims than in atheists/jews/christians/hindus/etc. In fact, it is possible it would be less prevalent with muslims, because muslim expressions of patriarchy are more scrutinized/opposed than the presentable white-rapist-in-a-suit variant that occupies every government, police station and corporation here in the global north. Patriarchy was established long before islam was a thing, and is one of the oldest and most insidious systems of domination. Your statement linking islam specifically to patriarchy seems based on anecdotal data, just like i could produce anecdotal data of muslim feminists proudly dismantling patriarchy.

nix23 5y ago

Let's talk first about the definition of a terrorist please?

mellosouls 5y ago

The Guardian is always finding angles to push the "women as victims" line, whatever the actual story. That's not to say there isn't truth to it in this case, or there aren't battles still to be fought for women's rights but ironically I think its constant search for this sort of spin is weirdly paternalistic.

southerntofu 5y ago

On a less serious note, it reminds me of this comic strip: https://i.imgur.com/pOVHqmC.png https://i.imgur.com/pOVHqmC.png

DaveExeter 5y ago

What do many police officers have in common? They abuse women.

sys_64738 5y ago

What do many politicians and actors have in common?