Recently we have seen attacks in Nice and near Nuerenberg. In both cases the authorities rejoice in the fact that the perpertators announced their allegiance to isis. Yet how much is that worth? A madman like me can announce my allegiance to isis. But does that make me directed by isis? No, it only means that i am individually inspired by isis, not directed. So any claim by isis for such attacks are null and void for people not directly directed by isis.
Kind regards, Vincent
To be under command, or to be an inspired nut case
Re: To be under command, or to be an inspired nut case
Sorry, I was busy, aside of other things also with some of those "nutjobs".
The whole thing is not that simple. Any group of people has it's small number of individuals with the one or the other psychological markers. It's basically statistics.Now, of course, any group is defined by something that makes it a group to begin with, and such a definition brings always a lot of cultural and sometimes even genetic patterns. Israel can probably say more about the genetics here, but some things are obvious. For example, the probability an African-American has a certain feeling for rhythms and dancing or also for basketball is higher than the probability a Caucasian has the same talent. The probability to find someone with sickle-cell anaemia in a group of immigrants from Peru is much lower than to find sickle-cell anaemia in people whose ancestry comes from East-Africa. And so on. And if you find someone who loves Sauerkraut with Brats ... there is a good bet, his ancestry is from Germany or Korea (no kidding). Which means, wherever you find a group of for example German immigrants, you find at some point sauerkraut.
Now, not all of those cultural markers are as hapless as an affinity for certain foods or the skill to shoot balls through hoops. Human groups have always defined themselves in terms of "we" and "them". But how far individuals in groups go with those definitions depend on the individual situation. Of course, a career criminal will have a less favourable picture of police officers than a usual shop clerk for example. So, in every group, you have outliers. People who have already lost options, think, they have no future, feel disenfranchised of the bigger societies around them and feel basically like they are nothing. To be honest, many of them are mediocre existences, have nothing they could look at and be proud of.
And this is where repetition and button-pressing starts. Propaganda mechanisms like that are actually quite old, but today, in the age of Internet and mass media, you can spread the same messages to everyone and nobody can stop you.
Here is the point: Most people, if they would stumble over those lone-wolf calls from ISIS would just shake their heads and go on. But those messages are not for you, the normal people. They include basically a psychological offer for those, I spoke about. Be a Holy Warrior, be never forgotten, be someone. Do this and you are not nobody, not nothing any more, people will know your name. Whatever you messed up ... it is all forgotten, you are then the Holy Warrior, Allah's Martyr (or the Defender of Western Culture, the Hero of your Bros, it depends which groups recruits which specific kind of damaged ones).
These messages are aimed for persons in those groups who follow the broad cultural strokes but additionally carry a lot of self-worth problems up to the point of a lot of self-loathing. You may have heard the term "black paladin"? People who are psychologicall so low on the self-esteem scale that they subscribe to a cause just to be "someone", to use the cause to avoid their own problems. Marwan al-Shecchi, one of the 9/11 hijackers, had all his adult life a problem with women taller than him. He started to stutter, blushed like a girl ... hey, that sucks if one is only what, 5'5"? He has other self-esteem problems as well. So, instead of being the stuttering loser, he ended up as Holy Warrior and by that road, in the WTC.
Mohammed Atta, another 9/11 hijacker. The terrorist who never got laid. No kidding. Indoctrinated by his father,a Muslim Brotherhood cleric, he was at the time, he got an interest in women already set on the imagination they need to be barefoot, pregnant and chained to a stove. So when he fell in love with a Palestinian girl, a teacher, she told him "no way". Instead of taking the rejection and thinking about why, Atta decided to become a Holy Warrior and claimed, he has anyway no time for girls, he is a Holy Warrior now and serves only "the cause". Boom, another psychological damaged guy who was manipulated and manipulated till he ended up in the WTC.
Mateen ... the Pulse-shooter. Everything points out, he was gay, he only couldn't allow himself to be gay because that's against Islam. So, be happy or be a good Muslim. And in this dilemma, he sees, other gays are happily kissing around, can marry, can live their lives. And his Imam and those Internet sites he visits tell him every day ... do this and you will be happy in the next life because if you die for Allah ... those messages have not much power for the majority of people who think, they have something to live for, but you only need to reach those who feel, they don't. And because certain kinds of spray around propaganda is careful designed to reach exactly those people, there is a responsibility. They work intentionally on igniting those basically psychologically damaged individuals.
To make another point clear here: This is not new and ISIS by far isn't the only group using this kind of mechanism. Now of course, if I would list too many other groups doing the same thing, someone would jump on me and call me for example "political incorrect" or a "racist" (because some of the groups doing it are defined by the race of their followers), which essentially would of course prove the point how far the fanatization of followers with those methods can go, but to avoid this hassle for now, let me take a historical example. Have you ever heard of the "Nihilists"? Actually, it would surprise me. I picked them as example because rarely anybody heard of them and they are kind of forgotten in history, so nobody can be insulted (they have, as far as I know no active followers anymore).
They used the same mechanism in pamphlets, called more or less between the lines for violent action, for revolution. Often, the call for revolution was worded in a way, that they could always argue, they only called for political change, but in the context and by the fact that some of them had already committed bomb attacks and shootings, the message was perceived by a lot of more or less damaged individuals in their target groups. How committed those followers were depended basically on the degree of their psychological damage they carried already. Many went so far as providing money, some went to protests, some went so far as providing hideouts, some went further. A minority, less than a 1/100th of a percent of the target group. But since the target groups are so big, the result was a spree of terror through Europe. Some of the victims were big heads, a czar for example, some secretaries of public offices in Austria-Hungary, a failed attack on a German emperor. Many of the victims died because they were only at the wrong time at the wrong place, for example when one blew up a bomb on Volksfest. And some were indirectly killed by the consequences ... when one of them killed the Austria-Hungarian heir to the throne in Sarajevo and caused by that WWI. The whole mess cost roughly 38 million dead (only military casualties). Because, and this is the curse of the statistics of big numbers ... you recruit a small percentage out of a big group and you get still enough to make sure, at some point, one of your inspired nutjobs will hit something big and important and till then, the perpetual onslaught will change societies. Which is actually what those manipulators aim for, not in the sense of a constructive change but in the sense of destruction.
So, that was a lot, but bottom line is, we have to take that serious, simply because it happened before and it worked and it worked because too many people didn't take it serious the last time ... and the time before ... and the time before ... I can bring more historical examples if you have doubts.
J.
The whole thing is not that simple. Any group of people has it's small number of individuals with the one or the other psychological markers. It's basically statistics.Now, of course, any group is defined by something that makes it a group to begin with, and such a definition brings always a lot of cultural and sometimes even genetic patterns. Israel can probably say more about the genetics here, but some things are obvious. For example, the probability an African-American has a certain feeling for rhythms and dancing or also for basketball is higher than the probability a Caucasian has the same talent. The probability to find someone with sickle-cell anaemia in a group of immigrants from Peru is much lower than to find sickle-cell anaemia in people whose ancestry comes from East-Africa. And so on. And if you find someone who loves Sauerkraut with Brats ... there is a good bet, his ancestry is from Germany or Korea (no kidding). Which means, wherever you find a group of for example German immigrants, you find at some point sauerkraut.
Now, not all of those cultural markers are as hapless as an affinity for certain foods or the skill to shoot balls through hoops. Human groups have always defined themselves in terms of "we" and "them". But how far individuals in groups go with those definitions depend on the individual situation. Of course, a career criminal will have a less favourable picture of police officers than a usual shop clerk for example. So, in every group, you have outliers. People who have already lost options, think, they have no future, feel disenfranchised of the bigger societies around them and feel basically like they are nothing. To be honest, many of them are mediocre existences, have nothing they could look at and be proud of.
And this is where repetition and button-pressing starts. Propaganda mechanisms like that are actually quite old, but today, in the age of Internet and mass media, you can spread the same messages to everyone and nobody can stop you.
Here is the point: Most people, if they would stumble over those lone-wolf calls from ISIS would just shake their heads and go on. But those messages are not for you, the normal people. They include basically a psychological offer for those, I spoke about. Be a Holy Warrior, be never forgotten, be someone. Do this and you are not nobody, not nothing any more, people will know your name. Whatever you messed up ... it is all forgotten, you are then the Holy Warrior, Allah's Martyr (or the Defender of Western Culture, the Hero of your Bros, it depends which groups recruits which specific kind of damaged ones).
These messages are aimed for persons in those groups who follow the broad cultural strokes but additionally carry a lot of self-worth problems up to the point of a lot of self-loathing. You may have heard the term "black paladin"? People who are psychologicall so low on the self-esteem scale that they subscribe to a cause just to be "someone", to use the cause to avoid their own problems. Marwan al-Shecchi, one of the 9/11 hijackers, had all his adult life a problem with women taller than him. He started to stutter, blushed like a girl ... hey, that sucks if one is only what, 5'5"? He has other self-esteem problems as well. So, instead of being the stuttering loser, he ended up as Holy Warrior and by that road, in the WTC.
Mohammed Atta, another 9/11 hijacker. The terrorist who never got laid. No kidding. Indoctrinated by his father,a Muslim Brotherhood cleric, he was at the time, he got an interest in women already set on the imagination they need to be barefoot, pregnant and chained to a stove. So when he fell in love with a Palestinian girl, a teacher, she told him "no way". Instead of taking the rejection and thinking about why, Atta decided to become a Holy Warrior and claimed, he has anyway no time for girls, he is a Holy Warrior now and serves only "the cause". Boom, another psychological damaged guy who was manipulated and manipulated till he ended up in the WTC.
Mateen ... the Pulse-shooter. Everything points out, he was gay, he only couldn't allow himself to be gay because that's against Islam. So, be happy or be a good Muslim. And in this dilemma, he sees, other gays are happily kissing around, can marry, can live their lives. And his Imam and those Internet sites he visits tell him every day ... do this and you will be happy in the next life because if you die for Allah ... those messages have not much power for the majority of people who think, they have something to live for, but you only need to reach those who feel, they don't. And because certain kinds of spray around propaganda is careful designed to reach exactly those people, there is a responsibility. They work intentionally on igniting those basically psychologically damaged individuals.
To make another point clear here: This is not new and ISIS by far isn't the only group using this kind of mechanism. Now of course, if I would list too many other groups doing the same thing, someone would jump on me and call me for example "political incorrect" or a "racist" (because some of the groups doing it are defined by the race of their followers), which essentially would of course prove the point how far the fanatization of followers with those methods can go, but to avoid this hassle for now, let me take a historical example. Have you ever heard of the "Nihilists"? Actually, it would surprise me. I picked them as example because rarely anybody heard of them and they are kind of forgotten in history, so nobody can be insulted (they have, as far as I know no active followers anymore).
They used the same mechanism in pamphlets, called more or less between the lines for violent action, for revolution. Often, the call for revolution was worded in a way, that they could always argue, they only called for political change, but in the context and by the fact that some of them had already committed bomb attacks and shootings, the message was perceived by a lot of more or less damaged individuals in their target groups. How committed those followers were depended basically on the degree of their psychological damage they carried already. Many went so far as providing money, some went to protests, some went so far as providing hideouts, some went further. A minority, less than a 1/100th of a percent of the target group. But since the target groups are so big, the result was a spree of terror through Europe. Some of the victims were big heads, a czar for example, some secretaries of public offices in Austria-Hungary, a failed attack on a German emperor. Many of the victims died because they were only at the wrong time at the wrong place, for example when one blew up a bomb on Volksfest. And some were indirectly killed by the consequences ... when one of them killed the Austria-Hungarian heir to the throne in Sarajevo and caused by that WWI. The whole mess cost roughly 38 million dead (only military casualties). Because, and this is the curse of the statistics of big numbers ... you recruit a small percentage out of a big group and you get still enough to make sure, at some point, one of your inspired nutjobs will hit something big and important and till then, the perpetual onslaught will change societies. Which is actually what those manipulators aim for, not in the sense of a constructive change but in the sense of destruction.
So, that was a lot, but bottom line is, we have to take that serious, simply because it happened before and it worked and it worked because too many people didn't take it serious the last time ... and the time before ... and the time before ... I can bring more historical examples if you have doubts.
J.
Free speech can never be achieved by dictatorial measures!
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