Terrorism

So another pretty major terrorist attack earlier in France, the details are as always still pretty unclear and I won't be addressing them much aside from the usual condemnations.

That hasn't stopped a lot of people here in the states though, Newt Gingrich, one of the three most likely candidates to be the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, chose today to propose that we give all Muslims a "Sharia test" and deport those who fail, as well as making it a felony to view websites that encourage terrorism. So there are at least a couple Constitutional Amendments that he isn't a fan of I guess.

The argument people bring up, all the time, when they are talking about restricting freedoms due to the safety of the country, is something to the effect of "we are fighting with one hand, while they are using everything they have."

It's true actually! They really are using everything they have, and they (they in this case being any terrorist group) can only perform attacks that kill a few dozen or a couple hundred civilians at a time, now that sounds like a lot and it is, and even one is too many if you happen to be that one. But that's it, they can't take over, they can't take any freedom away, they can't destroy the economy or confront our military on even terms, they can't even exist openly in the West. They can't win, it is literally impossible.

And they can't win against a culture that is not even fully mobilized to fight them.

So why should we?

They aren't worth that effort and they know it, they can only scare us, any lasting damage that is done is done by us to ourselves.

In a rational world we would all have recognized this literally generations ago, but we don't live in that kind of world, what we live in is a world where an entrenched system of politics works hand in hand with the military industrial complex, and indeed is almost indistinguishable from it. The only way that system retains power is with a threat though. The Nazi's are gone, and no one really cares about Communists anymore, not really, that just leaves terrorists, those in power know that they aren't really capable of hurting us, but if they don't have a threat, then they can't justify budget increases, and if they can't justify a budget, then they can't get lobbyist jobs after they quit government, or divert funds to companies run by friends, or any number of things that make the system function in the way it has for seventy five odd years.

It isn't like I think people like Gingrich wake up every day and think to themselves "How can I fool America into thinking they are in danger so I can make shitloads of money" because I don't, well maybe Gingrich, and probably the Bush family too, but for the most part those who maintain the status quo just do it because it is the status quo, they don't think any more about it than that it is what has always been done, they are just cells in the organism and since the organism keeps them alive they don't really ponder what it does too deeply.

Doesn't make them less horrible mind you but it's that banal evil that is almost worse because there is no grand plan behind it, just being evil because that is the way they always have been. It is this mindset that leads to people eating up shit like what Newt said today, or Trump says basically every day.

I guess I don't have a point here, I just wish people would stop giving so much of a shit about terrorism, all they can do is kill you, and they honestly aren't even that good at it. But governments historically have been pretty... efficient at murdering when they put their minds to it, it doesn't seem like such a good idea to encourage the activity in one to prevent the other.