Thank You.

really sad news today... I hope someone puts an end to this savagery once and for all.

Terrible news indeed - it's impossible to understand the thinking behind this evil shit.

Thank you. I am shocked beyond words at what just happened.

That's horrible. France accepts such a huge number of migrating Muslims and they pay back with a knife in the back.

My prayers are with the families of those who died and those who have been injured in this attack. France must heal, but she remains strong.

Al-Baghdadi likes to think that he's special and belongs to an organization that's special. I think the best punishment for him and the rest of the leaders of Daesh is to rot in jail for the rest their lives like common criminals. Even if it's not possible to arrest him, it's important to remind them and remind ourselves with everything that follows that these brutal acts are not that of righteous warriors but of murderers.

I was devastated by the news as well, as I have a friend in France. Thankfully, he wasn't anywhere near the site of the attacks, but still, what has happened is horrible. My condolences go out to all the victims and their families. Fuck the extremists.

My condolences to all the victims, families and friends. Extremists like ISIL are a cancer in this world.

Let's keep our thoughts on prayers on the victims, the families, and friends. The idea of forcing one's personally held beliefs on others is at the core of the current suffering. We've seen enough of that already from these brutal savages out there. Let's not turn on one another and have the thread locked because we've turned this topic into a political/ideological one.

I've got my thoughts on the matter, but you won't hear them from me. Not today.

France, keep your guard up. The enemy hates you for your love of liberty and your willingness to show it. Stay strong. When a rabid animal needs to be put down, put it down. We cherish your friendship and stand with you as you put the pieces back together.

my thoughts and suggestions on the matter aside, I of course send my condolences to the victims and France in general.

I do both.

Thought's go out from here. I condole.

https://drhurd.com/before-saying-i-support-fr … ease-read-this/

Please don’t say things like, “I stand with France,” or “Those poor French people, victims of that attack!” unless you’re prepared to say and do the following things:

Stop saying “Islam” is about peace and love. It’s not. It’s about submission; the people who really get this are the ones who launch these attacks in the name of their religion.

Stop supporting politicians like Obama, who insist that Islamic nations like Iran have our same fundamental values and can be trusted with billions of dollars in unfrozen assets (Obama’s treaty), and who don’t mean what they say when they want to wipe Israel off the map.

Stop saying we don’t really need a strong military and we cannot, under any circumstances, use the full might of our military arsenal to do things to stop militant Islam in its tracks, to quite literally scare the Allah out of these people.

Unless or until you start to rethink your stance, you have no business expressing compassion towards the victims of people in attacks whose perpetrators – knowingly or not – you aid and support via your positions.

The president of France calls the attacks in Paris by militant ISIS supporters an “act of war.” Excuse me? Haven’t we been at war since at least 9/11? Even going back as far as 1979, when the first openly organized Islamic government, Iran, took Americans hostage and brutalized them for a year before setting them free?

We’re not supposed to admit we’re at war with Islam. But Islam has been at war with everyone else for decades now. And it’s not going to stop.

I am so sick of people saying, “We can’t fight terrorism with violence. We have to understand them and figure out what makes them act this way.”

Envy, brutality and collectivist/social/racial hatred are what make them act this way. They’re not going to change, and they’re not going to stop. By trying to appease and understand them every chance we get, they interpret this as weakness, because it is, from their point-of-view. They respond with more brutality. They’re not ever going to stop, any more than Hitler and the Nazis would have stopped if, instead of taking them on directly, we had said, “Let’s try to understand them.”

You cannot defeat a morally certain enemy without moral certainty. But we do not live in an age of moral self-assertion. It’s considered mean, unkind and politically incorrect.
You do not have moral certainty if you keep insisting that your enemy really does not mean it.

Stop waiting for the “moderate” or life-loving Muslims to come out of the closet and morally condemn their violent brethren. These moderates are nowhere to be found. Either they do not exist, or they’re too weak or frightened to take on the people who do these things in the name of their faith-based philosophy.

Obama has stated that these attackers do not share certain basic, universal values with the rest of us. But Obama is the one who insists we cannot really fight terrorists because they operate underground, without state-sanctioned armies, and the like. Obama is the same one who gave away America’s credibility and unfroze billions in assets to the government of Iran, the one actual government known to sponsor and morally support Islamic terrorism around the world. What business does he have expressing outrage and horror? He might as well be on their side. Because he makes life easier for them, through things like this insane treaty he rammed by the Congress.

So before you rush to show others how sad and angry you are about what happened in Paris, stop to think of the ideas, attitudes and elected officials you’ve been supporting.
Ideas have consequences, and if you support the wrong ones, this is what you get.

Condolences to France.

Sliderider, please keep your political views to yourself. This is not a political forum and it just drags down this subject and the forum in general.

Can someone just ban sliderider already? His posts are at best pointless, often ill informed / off topic, and are downright offensive in this instance.

Thoughts and prayers go out to France and families affected by these acts of violence.

badmojo wrote:

Can someone just ban sliderider already? His posts are at best pointless, often ill informed / off topic, and are downright offensive in this instance.

I don't generally like political discussions on the internet, especially in technical forums, and do my best to stay away from them. However, I believe that certain things should not go unanswered.

Here you are, asking to ban a forum member, who is a little more senior than yourself, and contributed a little more content to the forum than yourself, and why? Because he posted a heated post in a fundamentally heated topic? Because he wrote something that you disagree with?

I repeat, I don't like political discussions in technical forums. At the same time, people like to be able to discuss various things in the communities they belong to, and that's why most technical forums have "off-topic" sub-forums as well.

I fully understand that these discussions have a tendency to get real ugly, real fast, and this is why I generally don't participate at them, and have no objections when moderators decide to keep the forum clear of such discussions (at least 2 posts were deleted from this thread already).

But you have to ask yourself - what is even the point of a thread such as this, if you are not going to have anything in it other than "condolences to the victims"? Do you think any of the victims or their families is going to go to VOGONS, of all places, for support? Any of them going to feel better for it? The only point I see, unfortunately, is to boost one's ego, as "I offered condolences and condemned the hideous crime, thus I am a good person".

Now, I am not going to pass judgment on every one of sliderider's posts, and I've certainly disagreed with him on more than one occasion (you don't have to look very far back in the forum, if you're curious), but at least in this particular case, I don't see how his post can be considered pointless, and it is quite on-topic. As far as the "downright offensive" nature of it, I suggest to learn a little bit from Paul Graham's well-written essay about the usage of labels to suppress voices/ideas we don't like:
http://paulgraham.com/say.html

And more specifically, my favorite quote from it, which summarizes it succinctly:

Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.

And again, one last time: if the moderators believe that the forum should be clear of any discussions which can be considered political, controversial, or just plain get ugly - let them delete posts and lock threads as they see fit to maintain the peace. But suggesting that someone should be banned for it, IMO, is crossing the line.