just horrific. ISIL is trying to provoke a backlash against French Muslims, if not usher Trump into office to make their apocalyptic fever dreams come true.

the Mahdi is not coming back, you crazy Sunni murderers. the end of the world is never coming.

Jesus... Pretty effective for a "JV team" that's "on the run."

Pity one of the Stranger's resident gun-fondlers wasn't there to save the day.

Islam is a religion of peace and love!!! I look forward to our local Mosques here in Seattle taking over downtown on Friday and marching down 4th Avenue Friday afternoon at 4 pm condemning these attacks. You know: really standing up to what is being done in their name.

It feels so hopeless. I simply cannot conceive of any pragmatic solution to the problem of homicidally maniacal one off losers willing to pay the price of death for the reward of killing innocent people at random. I really hope it's just my lack of imagination. It's just everywhere right now it seems. Social media is quite as ugly as you'd expect it to be, which is to say, uglier than is even comprehensible. Be careful out there.

@6 It's called war and we aren't willing to return in back to these assholes in kind. Why? Because we are scared to offend people in the process. So until we nut up, get used to this fucking shit and it will get worse.

Love and flowers don't mean fuck when they respond with mass slaughter.

Cato - it might be a little dangerous for them to do so, don't you think?

I guess some people can't let go of the crutch to blame an entire class of people for the actions of misguided individuals. It's easy, maybe it feels good, it certainly strokes the bigot bone swimmingly, but it's fundamentally misguided, intellectually barren, and utterly at odds with reality.

I get the outrage, but the resulting delusion does not get a hall pass on logical reasoning. Sorry.

"These assholes in kind"

Right, these one off individuals acting on their own agency, from all sorts of walks of life, in little pockets here and there and everywhere, in all societies across the entire globe.

And by the way, even though I assume you are a twelve year old teenager with severe learning disabilities based on your excessively low intellectual capacity, fuck off with your "love and flowers". Those are your words, not mine. I never called for anything of the sort.

You don't understand because you're not capable.

#7: And what is the proper response, arresting every imam, deporting every Muslim, randomly shooting Muslim civilians in retaliation? When you talk about not pussyfooting, what exactly are you talking about here? Bombing the Islamic State's dwindling territory into the stone age isn't going to stop random violence because ultimately this shit is stateless. So what does that leave us with when you talk about war? Banning mosques? Arresting anyone who says anything that sounds marginally radical? Officially declaring Muslims second class citizens? I just want clarification, I want to know what this war of yours looks like. At least then we can have a real debate. I don't like ambiguity when people throw around words like "War."

11: It's not like France is a bastion of political correctness these days.

Ah. The usual resident Chicken Hawks take roost in another terrorism thread.

Hey there tough guys you wanna kill Ay-rabs so badly the Kurdish resistance is desperate for Mercs. Pays not bad.

#13: While the context you provide is important for understanding the origins of militant and extreme brands of Islam (you left out the brutal repression of fundamentalist Muslims by secular Arab governments, but we can file that under neocolonialism), after a while you can't really blame Israel or colonialism for some random psycho driving a truck through a crowd of soft targets. Yeah, the guy is no doubt angry, as losers tend to be. I suppose the argument can be made that France is fighting Muslim extremists abroad and are therefore legitimate targets, but the extremists they happen to be fighting are insanely nihilistic shitheads who hold their own people in contempt. Sectarian slaughter isn't exactly a noble cause regardless of the history.

In the end of the day I'm pretty angry, but I'm not going to run over 70 people in a truck.

I blame social media.

I blame "Time magazine cover with a photo of a computer."

So Cato's going with Trump, right?

You can't prevent attacks like this without turning your country into a nightmarish totalitarian police state -- and under France's state of emergency, they already had roving checkpoints and warrantless wiretapping, searches, seizures, and detention. The best you can do is to reduce the motives and rationales for committing them.

Unfortunately, France's history as a brutally tenacious colonial power in North Africa is still living memory; it has treated its own Muslim and Beur populations like second-class citizens (complete with de facto ghettos and nearly impenetrable glass ceilings) since the end of the colonial era; it participated in the occupation of Afghanistan; it was the prime instigator (with support from Cameron and Hillary) of the overthrow of Gaddafi and the destruction of Libya; it provided military support to the US and Britain in their attempt to overthrow the Assad government in Syria; and it prosecutes support for BDS as an anti-semitic (not anti-Israeli-policy) hate crime. There's more, but those are the high points.

This attack was as tragic as the ones in Paris, and will further fuel xenophobia, racism, and islamophobia. I hate to say this about a country I love in many ways, but these attacks are to a significant extent France's chickens coming home to roost. To perhaps an even more significant extent, they're America's chickens coming home to roost in France. Our longstanding one-sided support for Israel, right or wrong, our support for US-friendly Arab dictators, our destruction of Iraq, our suppression and subversion of the Arab Spring everywhere possible, and our arms shipments to the US allies destroying Yemen have caused even more Arab and Muslim suffering and resentment than France's own recent contributions ... but France is a much closer target with a much larger and more disaffected Arab and Muslim population to recruit from.

Games without frontiers, war without tears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWOsCkLW…

If looks can kill they probably will.

War without tears.

@19 And yet you see the exact same arguments being trotted out by the left every time there is a mass shooting here.

In another context, what you wrote would be called blaming the victim. Either two wrongs make a right or they don't. You don't get to say they do to suit one particular political hobbyhorse and then they don't when the politics cuts the other way.

So here are your two, viable options.

(1) Everyone needs to man up (and yes, that's appropriate; freedom especially calls for men to be courageous), accept that the world is a dangerous place, that people are going to abuse their rights and freedoms to do horrible things because deep down, people all have their horrible side.

That doesn't mean doing nothing, but it does mean that most of what you do will be after the fact. To the extent you can, you hunt down and punish those individuals who are responsible. And that's it. Yes, this applies to Orlando just as much as Nice.

This is the path of freedom. And freedom necessarily implies personal risk and responsibility.

This is the hard path. But it's also the courageous one.

Or (2), you can give the state the power to prevent this. That will include highly intrusive monitoring and totalitarian tactics. Many of these will be applied on the basis of race and religion as applying these tactics on everybody would be expensive (but everyone will be monitored to some extent, as they already are). Basically, your life turns into an airport. But you'd be as safe as humanly possible.

And more: Torture. Kidnappings. Secret prisons. Assassinations of Americans. We have already done all of these things in the name of security. Yes, even Obama.

This is the easy path. The coward's path.

Freedom or security. You can't have both. Ask Ben Franklin.

Frankly, my opinion is that anyone who chooses the latter path is a traitor to American values. But both Trump and Clinton are running on varying shades of the security regime (and Bush and Obama governed on that basis). Which suggests to me that American civilization is probably entering a decadent phase.

The fact of the matter is that Americans (mostly) are not willing to put their lives on the line for their values any more. We'd rather outsource that. That suggests to me that the heartwood of the American tree is rotten at the core and just waiting for a good push.

Note that this is one case where compromise doesn't work. Because compromise is simply a slower slide to the totalitarian state. The PATRIOT Act was a compromise. And now there will be calls for further compromise. And after the next attack, there will be calls for another compromise.

There are always more attacks. Always. Terrorism isn't an enemy, it's a tactic. And a highly effective one, because it induces the target to attack itself. Hell, 9/11 may yet end up being the catalyst that ultimately leads to this country's demise. Therefore, the security shibboleth will always be held out in front of us as justification for giving away a little more freedom, a little more liberty. You want your kids to be safe, right?

Better: Raise your children to die free men and women.

@21 (Corydon):

And yet you see the exact same arguments being trotted out by the left every time there is a mass shooting here.

"And yet?" I'm not sure what you mean by that. Doing horrible things to another group => more terrorist attacks. Having a brutally mercenary, unequal, insecure, and inhumane society => more mass shootings. How is there a difference in the logic and the conclusions?

In another context, what you wrote would be called blaming the victim.

I don't think I was blaming the victim so much as I was linking cause and predictable effect.

Either two wrongs make a right or they don't.

I don't think I ever suggested that two wrongs make a right.

You don't get to say they do to suit one particular political hobbyhorse and then they don't when the politics cuts the other way.

I'm not sure what two different hobbyhorses I'm supposed to have invoked in my comment.

Raise your children to die live as free men and women. And teach them that if they go around whacking the crap out of bee hives to steal the honey, their friends and neighbors, and people living near the bee hives, are going to get stung.

Fixed that for you.

By the way, the big winners of these attacks are the Front National, French military contractors, the French homeland-security complex, and the enemies of civil liberties. Sarkozy is the guy who decided to destroy Libya to grab its oil and prevent it from setting up a viable alternative to CFA Francs and Western bank loans, and the Socialists just rammed through a major weakening of deeply cherished French worker protections. The National Front is xenophobic, islamophobic, nationalistic, anti-EU, and anti-globalisation, and I think Marine Le Pen has now has a better shot than ever at winning the 2017 presidential election.

>Sure 70+ people just got slaughtered en masse, but what about those eeeeeeevil right-wingers?

Liberal priorities ladies and gentlemen. PCM you are a disgusting human being. How about putting down Noam Chomsky for a while and get in touch with the real world. You are apparently more concerned about the Front Nationale's potential votes than the innocent people who were the victims of senseless slaughter. Fuck off.

@23 No, you fuck off. The strategy of Isis is to provoke an authoritarian stiffening in the Western world, so it is completely legitimate to be concerned about the National Front taking power in France; however, your comment history suggests that you wouldn't mind having neofascists like the FN gaining access to political power.

Fuckley and Corydon -

You appear to live in a hysterical paradigm where "liberals" don't believe in seeking reparations and punishing criminals. This is a false claim, utterly baseless, not supportable by data, and frankly ridiculous.

The Orlando shooter and the assailant in Nice are both dead. So in all your smug knowingness, pretell, who exactly remains to be punished for their actions? We're militarily targeting terrorist leaders and sects, but that's not enough, so we should just kill all Muslims instead right? Innocents be damned. They are brown anyway.

And by the way, should we kill all Norwegians because of the actions of Anders Breivik, or you accept that as a one off because he was white, and not Muslim. You have no solutions, and your bloodlust is unbelievably dangerous. It invokes the worst instincts in mankind and endangers all of us.

When did masculinity and intelligence become mutually exclusive? Can you even hold jobs? How can you possibly be so blindingly stupid?

You offer exactly zero viable solutions.

The driver has been identified and oddly he wasn't a Lutheran. I mean I was hoping this slaughter was perpetrated by one of those Christians who won't bake cakes for lesbians but damn!! It was one of those peace loving Muslims.

But we need to blame ourselves first. Right Stranger staff? It's OUR fault this happened. I mean Islam is a religion of love.

Or can we expect the mosques in Seattle to organize a rally and parade on 4th Avenue today condemning these violent attacks? Can we? If they don't then face it kids: your local mosque really doesn't have that much of a problem with them.

Cato you must really love the smell of your own ass, to spend so much time with your head in it:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew…

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/24/opinion/ob…

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/a…

http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/08…

http://time.com/4112830/muslims-paris-te…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/postevery…

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/9525048.h…

Going forward I call upon you to organize a parade every time someone from your race, religion, city or nation commits an atrocity, to prove that you're against it. You must start by organizing a parade against Ted Bundy (a Republican even!) and Timothy McVeigh.

@28:

And when he's done with those he can start with planning parades against: Wade Michael Page, Scott Roeder, Jim David Adkisson, Paul Jennings Hill, Eric Rudolph, James Charles Kopp, and Joseph Stack for starters. That ought to keep him occupied for quite some time.

I'm not seeing or hearing anything that says this was a jihad type attack. All I'm getting is that it was yet another of those weird loner types with women issues (his wife left him, he didn't take it well). I blame testosterone for this one, not Islam.

@26 You are conflating the mores and practices that go along with underdevelopment and have gotten much worse in recent times with religion that is used by entrenched ultraconservatives to slow down the march toward the modern world. Arab women seemed more free 50 years ago before someone let the wahhabists become king makers (who is that btw?). Religion itself eventually evolves to remain relevant.

@30 The weapons in the truck were mostly fake so it does look like someone not necessarily closely connected to terror networks but murdering us with their vehicles is now part of the agenda according to Isis propaganda.

France has that idiot bigot Le Pen. ISIL is trying to get her elected president. Honestly, I'd be shocked if her family wasn't part of the Vichy government.
Did you see her vile op-ed on the Times after the Orlando attacks? Reject her hate. I'm a French ex pat and she doesn't speak for me, she speaks for ISIL.

Yo, trolls and Dumpster people, I also have US citizenship, so don't bother responding to me with any nativism crap.

33: Yeah, ultimately this is really an effort to bring a brutal crackdown on Muslims so that IS can have their fantasy uprising/war in Europe. I despise Le Pen and the far right, but we all know that IS and their supposed Muslim supporters aren't going to win that battle, and all Muslims will suffer in that situation.Of course, the far right shares the weird fantasy, really believing that a Muslim caliphate in Europe is possible. Both sides exaggerate the demographic power of Muslims, which is far too minor to represent a genuine existentialist threat.

Other than trying to provoke deeper French engagement in Syria, I honestly don't understand how radical Muslims in Europe really believe they're going to benefit in the long run. Past a certain point, it will just mean mass deportations and immigration bans, an no more European cake for everyone. As far as I can tell there are two kinds of radicals involved: sociopath nihilists who have taken up the flag of radicalism to work out their inadequacy issues and/or commit murder suicide, and religious nuts who genuinely believe the apocalypse is nigh. In either case, what they're doing in Europe has no real long-term strategic value to radical Islam or anyone.

@23 (William F. Fuckley): Like Corydon with his domestic mass shootings, you seem to be projecting an awful lot of things onto me. Just because I take a big-picture view doesn't mean I don't care about the victims. It means I'd like there to be fewer new ones in the future.

#25: Correction: existentialist should be existential. Hordes of continental philosophy majors led by the vampire lord Sartre are not rising up.

@37: Should be @35 actually. Not my week.

You offer exactly zero viable solutions.

This is exactly my point. What are the viable solutions?

So today, it seems like this guy was mentally ill and off his meds. How do you prevent this? France already has gun laws and in any case, he killed people with a truck. What do you want to do? Ban trucks?

Or perhaps you want the government going through his medical files. Checking up to make sure he's taking his prescriptions as he should. Incidentally, does he get a choice in all this?

Just what exactly do you propose to do?

You cannot stop bad things from happening

That is a fact of life.

You can either respond to that fact with fear and cowardice and side with Trump and Clinton (both sides of the same coin on this issue...both want to use the state to attack freedoms in the name of security). Or you say, yes, even though there is personal risk to myself, I'd rather take the risk that some number of my fellows will abuse their freedoms in order to preserve my own.

Here's another truth: we will all die at some point. No-one can stop that either. Not even you. What you can in some ways influence is the manner in which you meet your maker.

Just some poor soul who went off his meds. Check that. Make that 3+ poor souls that went off their meds at the same time...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-…