Damn, I guess I missed new stuff...what's with this other shooting at MIT?

WTF is going on here, I need to go read some news.

Chechen Islamists.
1 dead, 1 running and soon to be dead.

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Suspect #1 (the older brother) chose death by cop.

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Kids have been here multiple years. One went to high school all four years with the son of Robin Young, who hosts a daily radio show on NPR.

I'm not giving up on sexual frustration. Doubt this is some internationally coordinated thing. It still seems like disaffected youth to me. However the fact that they (or at least their family) are Muslims does add an important twist.

From what i've heard of their culture, it probably bolsters your sexually frustrated angle

um...it's more than a couple of kids with a muslim family.

Take a look at his youtube page
http://www.youtube.com/user/muazseyfullah

http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/wh ... hokhar-tsa

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Maybe, but if I made it through the sexual frustration of my teens and 20's without building a pipebomb, then anyone should be able to handle their sexual frustration without losing it IMO.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/19/dead- ... lim-boxer/


When Russians think about Islamic terrorism, they think about guys like this.
Keep telling yourself they had different motives, it's not playing out that way.

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Yeah, this looks like a radical. However, he could have just as easily (maybe more easily) been radicalized while living here in the US, as he could have from his family in the Caucases. In fact, he undoubtedly had much more access to radical ideas through technology here than he would have had in Chechnia or Dagistan.

And Chechens traditionally would have their biggest beef with Russia. If this were about Chechen nationalism, I find it hard to understand why they would choose to attack the the Boston Marathon, and not claim responsibility for the attack to boot. I'm thinking now that you can't ignore their background, but that they still probably acted alone.

A disaffected youth who turns to radical Islam is still at base a disaffected youth more than a devout Muslim. Were these guys to experience that same alienation in say Idaho, they might turn into white supremacists. I think that these guys' background probably lead them to grasp at radical Islam while they were grasping at straws to explain their alienation. But the background probably explains why they chose those particular straws to grasp at more than it expalins why they were grasping for those straws in the first place.

Whatever excuse makes you feel good.
You could say the exact same thing about the 19 hijackers.
young pissed off guys get a bad idea from religious zealots.

There's more coming out about these guys every minute.

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Young guys killing people doesn't make me feel good FYI. And you could absolutely say the same thing about the 9/11 hijackers. That's not my point. It's just that when a Muslim does this, everyone starts blaming Islam like I'm hearing from you. My point is that they are terrorists, but so is Jared Laughner (spellling?), so was Timothy McVeigh. Terrorism is not exclusive to Islam. Islam can just be used as an excuse for it, like anti-government sentiments, or even "national security" (like invading Iraq under false pretenses for example, that's terrorism too).

Now to me, it sounds like you're happy to just chalk this up to them being Muslims. That's an overly facile answer IMO, and one that will only breed more hatred and misunderstanding. You can say "Look, these guys were not like me, so I don't have to think about their viewpoint or try to understand anything else". But that kind of explanation doesn't satisfy me.

To dwell on the sexual frustration thing again, I think it's important to point out that almost all of the terrorists we know about, whether foreign or domestic, Muslim or Christian, are pretty much almost always men. How many of you think those guys were getting laid regularly? I'd say next to none of them. Obviously there's more than just that going on with them, but I can't help feeling that they wouldn't have all been so angry if they were getting a little nookie.

I can almost guarantee you Osama Bin Laden was getting tons of nookie... granted, it was probably forced nookie, but nookie nonetheless.

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@TJLuckman550

True, but he also never made himself a suicide bomber, and never himself carried out an attack within the US. He was a lot more worried with self-preservation than most of the guys I'm thinking of, and maybe that was partly because he was getting laid. (Also came from a wealthy family, which may have made him a lot less likely to willingly become a martyr).

Point here is that it takes a lot more than being a Muslim to make someone a terrorist. It's a combination of factors specific to individuals' lives that invloves a heck of a lot more than just a religion or nationality. If that's all it took, then all Muslims would be terrorists, or all people from Pakistan or wherever would be terrorists. But they're not, so you can't make that the only variable.

Sorry, but that's a false equivalency.
(I'm not by any stretch of the imagination saying Islam is to blame or bad or anything like that.)
There may be no difference in the acts of blowing people up for whatever twisted ideology, but there is a difference when it happens over and over again for one particular ideology.
You've been bending over backwards this entire thread to try to position this as NOT an act of Islamic terrorism. Well it is.


No, I chalk it up to them being Islamic extremists trying to make a point by killing innocent Americans.
They can burn in hell with their viewpoint, I couldn't care less. So you're right about that.

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If you don't try and understand their gripes, you'll never stop it from happening again. This is exactly why I didn't want it to be Islamists, because then a lot of people will just wash their hands of the whole thing and say "That's that", without ever really examining it.

As far as an ideology being the source of violence over and over, many radical Muslims would say that the most destructive ideology is capitalism, which has been the ideology behind countless wars over the last two hundred years. I would not argue that it has been the most destructive force of the last century. And I would also say that economic inequalities are mostly what forces future terrorists to embrace radical Islam. That's not to excuse them from commiting violent acts. But if you take these individuals' acts as a license to start a global war against Islam (as many Muslims interpret such things as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), then of course you're just dooming yourself to more misunderstanding and more violence. It's not OK for radicals to kill innocent Americans, but it's also not OK to use those killings as the basis for more killings of different innocents a la Iraq.

I understand the myriad of gripes parts of the Muslim world may have against the US and / or capitalism.
That understanding doesn't get me in the same ballpark as the mentality of someone who would commit an act of terror and attempt to kill as many innocent lives as possible.

I know how you feel about Iraq and Afghanistan, but is it really your position that everyone would be better off if we just let the Taliban run things?
Because that's the alternative to our unjust war over there.

also, the uncle of these two dipshits is pretty awesome
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/1 ... 16075.html

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UNCLE RUSLAN!

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@TJLuckman550

In Afghanistan, the alternative might be the Taliban, but certainly not in Iraq. There wasn't even any Al Qaeda there until we went and created an environment for them. I have much more mixed feelings about Afghanistan than I do about Iraq (incredible mistake). But the fact of the matter is that 12 years on, all we've really done there is create a government which controls maybe Kabul. And the rest of the country is either being controlled by warlords or the Taliban. So it's not like we've really created THAT much better of a situation for all the destruction and lost lives. I don't think it has to be an either/or situation that says either we go take control of things or the Taliban (or Taliban-style groups) will take over.