The New "Religion Vs Science" Thread

You are a lover of words. It's fun to arrange and sing them, sometimes even forgetting what one is talking about.

May 20, 2016 - 11:35pm PT
ok Ward... but who cares who was a communist, a lefty, disaffected, etc, etc...

did you actually read their arguments?

or do you just dismiss them, ad hominem?

I am not overly enamored of Harris and even less so of Chomsky.

BTW the time of your post clearly establishes you are currently, on this page, the leader in circadian mismatches.

Harris is simply too full of ... Harris.

Ward: ---what has led you to believe I forgot what I was talking about.

Lobbing stuff into this thread sans personal experience is like dancing about engineering.

WTF is that supposed to mean?

Foreign military occupation accounts for 98.5% -- and the deployment of American combat forces for 92% -- of all the 1,833 suicide terrorist attacks around the world in the past six years (2004-2009).

Pape's Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It is co-authored with James K. Feldman, a defense policy analyst who formerly taught at the Air Force Institute of Technology. The book was published by the University of Chicago Press in early October 2010.

Cutting the Fuse adds substantially to Pape's earlier work on terrorism, evaluating more than 2100 suicide attacks (6 times the number evaluated in Dying to Win), developing a new social logic of transnational suicide terrorists, identifying the key factors that explain the ebb and flow within suicide terrorist campaigns, conducting detailed case studies of the 8 largest campaigns (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Al Qaeda, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka), and offering expanded policy recommendations: Avoid where feasible stationing troops where they will be perceived as occupiers threatening local culture and institutions or coercing the government of an occupied state to do things that would be perceived as benefiting the occupiers at the expense of the local population. When occupation is necessary, minimize the threat to local culture by helping local officials to do things they might otherwise want to do but didn't previously have the ability and by treating collateral damage with great sensitivity (pp. 330–333).

"Overall, foreign military occupation accounts for 98.5% -- and the deployment of American combat forces for 92% -- of all the 1,833 suicide terrorist attacks around the world in the past six years [2004-2009]." (p. 28)

"Have these actions ... made America safe? In a narrow sense, America is safer. There has not been another attack on the scale of 9/11. ... In a broader sense, however, America is not safer. Anti-American suicide terrorism is rapidly rising around the world." (p. 318)

"In both Iraq and Afghanistan ... local communities that did not inherently share the terrorists' political, social, and military agenda, eventually support[ed] the terrorists organization's campaign ... after local communities began to perceive the Western forces as an occupier ... as foreign troops propping up and controlling their national government, changing their local culture, jeopardizing economic well-being, and conducting combat operations with high collateral damage ... . But, we have also seen in Iraq that this perception of occupation can be changed ... ." (p. 333)

"For over a decade our enemies have been dying to win. By ending the perception that the United States and its allies are occupiers, we can cut the fuse to the suicide terrorism threat." (p. 335)