[Shara]

killing people is bad? Why hasn't anybody told me?

[mofoapoo]

prophet, I wasn't really trying to say one was better than the other.  If you really want to measure who's worse than who, yes, groups like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are obviously worse, but when people start making "rules" for someone to be considered a terrorist or not, then it slowly becomes "Yes, only Muslims can be terrorists".

don't get me wrong, I even hate the word terrorist.  It's too easily pegged on whoever would best fit political agendas.  Just like communist.

how many civilians died in Iraq this last war?  Does that consider the US army terrorists?  They are an organized group, attempted to kill and scare away another group.  just because they follow slightly more rules when dealing with killing, makes them less wrong?

I'm not really taking a stance here, more just playing the devil's advocate.

[Prophet_Tenebrae]

When you're a government, you migrate from terrorist to either hero or dictator... or maybe war criminal if you're not very good. I guess it's like religion, a few thousand people having and invisible man in the sky is KRAAAAZEEEE. When you've got a few million, we'd sure as hell better respect them or we're bigots!

But if anything, one can have MORE sympathy for the IRA than Al'Qaeda. Britain - although, it certainly started with the English before the act of union - pretty much pistol whipped the Irish for... what, seven centuries, on and off. Al'Qaeda was clearly pissed off BEFORE the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan and for what... not being too keen on Israel? If anything, people based out of Afghanistan should be pissed off at the Russians... but I suppose the USA is "the great Satan"... and the UK is the "little Satan". Not good for our self-esteem.

[onion_writer]

It's a bit more complicated than that.

The United States' main export is media. Imagine that you were fundamentalist -- fundamentalist anything. You're trying to reign in dissent, observe offshoot rules developed 1,500 years ago. You were a splinter group even then. Like the Amish, but moreso, and 1,000 years more ancient, with a willingness to embrace violence.

So, far the last 30 years your children and grandchildren have been exposed not only to mainstream U.S. news, but to our vapid entertainment. And God/Allah help everyone -- the kids seem to like "Dallas," thongs, Paris Hilton and everything that is flashy, mindless, sexy and unspiritual.

Even over here we get a bit jazzed over the the young ones finding out too much too early. Take it to the Middle East and multiply it by a thousand. From their standpoint, we are polluting their culture. And the main thing is, they're right.

In the U.S. we value the free interchange of ideas, but we still have far-right fundamentalist Christians who wig out over MTV. But how would we like it if we got a 24/7 feed from another culture and religion half a world away, and out teens took to it? And even preferred it?

There are many here who hate even allowing school instruction in Spanish to Spanish speakers. Imagine if we were awash in examples of role models, public decorum and values that were far, far, far more foreign?

We're all xenophobic. I personally love to be challenged by new ideas, and I think it can only make a culture stronger. But then, I'm not fundamentalist anything.

[Palomine]

I don't have the energy to get into all this in detail, but I just wanted to state that I disagree with the original premise of this thread: IMO, 'white people' CAN BE and ARE considered 'terrorists.' The ones that come to mind right off the top of my head are (of course) Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, Bruce Edwards Ivens (assuming he was actually guilty), Joseph Stack, etc...

[Prophet_Tenebrae]

I'd suggest episode 1 of season 2 of Newswipe by Charlie Brooker, which goes into lengthy explanation of the nature of how the news is about a narrative - and if things don't fit in that, they don't pay attention. See the 90s flip from US militias to the 2000's favouring of Islam... and the ignoring (more or less) of a white guy blowing himself up in Oklahoma City in 2005. Yeah, white suicide bomber. After 9/11... who wasn't a convert to Islam... you just KNOW if he'd been a swarthy bastard or a convert, that would have had the news go bat shit crazy.

Bottom line, the news is shit... mostly because it's about appealing to humanity. Which is also shit.

[TheZookie007]

killing people is bad? Why hasn't anybody told me?

Because you knock off anyone who tries...the rest of us want to stay alive!

[onion_writer]

news is about a narrative - and if things don't fit in that, they don't pay attention.
Bottom line, the news is shit... mostly because it's about appealing to humanity. Which is also shit.

I agree with your general conclusion, that news is shit, but as a working reporter I disagree with everything else. What keeps a story going is novelty and continued discovery of novelty, unfortunately. Building goes boom -- a two day story. Balloon Boy has bizarre family -- the possibilities are endless.

You are indeed correct that we get the news coverage we deserve. The media goes with what pays, with what the public wants.

[Prophet_Tenebrae]

It's not really my conclusion, it's that of Brooker and in fairness, I was over simplifying... but balloon boy is a great example of a narrative. I'd be interested to know what a journalist made of Charlie Brooker's take on the news though, most of Newswipe is available on youtube.

[pedonbio]

Here's another good question: Why are non-white people never considered racists?

PregNut, like Palomine, I won't get into this crap because it bores me. But I take your question as the sincere product of the grossly inadequate education in history you received by living in America. Please don't be insulted; I don't mean it that way. But, like Q_BE, it seems like nobody ever sat down with you and explained the obvious: About 90% of the basic, core beliefs we Americans hold to be true are crap invented to sell something.

The idea of "race" was invented about 1650 by English slave traders to justify African slavery. It is a totally artificial construct, having no biological reality.

And why aren't white people ever considered terrorists? Because we'd kill anyone who said so.

[solvegas]

PregNut, like Palomine, I won't get into this crap because it bores me. But I take your question as the sincere product of the grossly inadequate education in history you received by living in America. Please don't be insulted; I don't mean it that way. But, like Q_BE, it seems like nobody ever sat down with you and explained the obvious: About 90% of the basic, core beliefs we Americans hold to be true are crap invented to sell something.

The idea of "race" was invented about 1650 by English slave traders to justify African slavery. It is a totally artificial construct, having no biological reality.

And why aren't white people ever considered terrorists? Because we'd kill anyone who said so.

I respectfully disagree with you pedonbio. Fear of the outsider, the different, " not like us " is much, much older than 1650. Slavery had been a huge commercial enterprise well before anything like England existed. When Spartacus led the slave revolt he thought he could succeed because slaves outnumbered Romans in the italian peninsula. The word slave is actually derived from the slavic people because so many were slaves. Most slaves brought to the americas were sold by their fellow africans or arab traders to europeans to work the tobacco or sugar fields of the new world. Man's inhumanity to man is a UNIVERSAL sin perpetrated by all. Slavery was not introduced by the europeans to the americas because it already existed here. And if someone is different than you, it can be easy to rationalize perverse treatment toward him.

[Prophet_Tenebrae]

I'd agree with solvegas, while the notion that white Europeans were in some way "better" than other ethnicities was clearly seen as a justification for the then popular past times of slavery and moving into other people's countries and murdering them (for their own good, naturally), you can look at something like the Indian caste system and there you have a social structure that treats the lowest people as subhuman.

[TheZookie007]

Most slaves brought to the americas were sold by their fellow africans or arab traders to europeans to work the tobacco or sugar fields of the new world.

This has been a very contentious topic in the past: how culpable are Africans in the selling off of their brethren to the Europeans/Arabs and thus how much did they themselves profit from the trans-Atlantic slave trade? How much blood is on their hands? Having gone back and forth on this with many people, academics, historians, economists and civilians, I have come to a conclusion: perhaps the problem stemmed from an imperfect understanding of what slavery meant to the different communities involved with it. In most west African societies, the concept of slavery was actually closer to the "indentured servitude" system once popular in Europe. It was not based on "race", nor did it imply that the slave was inferior to the master. Indeed, a slave could not only buy his freedom, he could also rise to a position of authority and rule over both slave and free. Jaja of Opobo is an excellent example. The Europeans, on the other hand, moved from the "indentured servitude" attitude to the need to justify their desire to oppress another people and thus into the classic race-based "superior/inferior" construct that was the hallmark of the "evils of slavery". You know how we joke that the English and the Americans are two people separated by a common language? How much larger is the separation between two protagonists who use the same word ("slave") but unbeknownst to each other have radically different meanings in mind when they use it?

So, pedonbio is largely right when it comes to the c. 1650 development of the concept of race as a means to oppress The Other -- but solvegas is also correct humanity has always been about the oppression of, and the hatred of, The Other.

[pedonbio]

Maybe I'm missing the point here. We weren't talking about slavery, which has a completely different (and much older) history. "Race" as that concept is discussed in the West now, did not exist before 1650 or so and was created by a commercial interest to justify an activity which was running into opposition.

Check, for example, Shakspeare's "Othello". There is no mention of the modern concept of "race" in a play written in the 1590s.

[DruulEmpire]

And yet Iago was able to get mileage out of "Even now the black ram is tupping the white ewe."

Perhaps it's fair to say that racism existed before there was even a proper word for it, or "race" itself.  It also does honor to Will that none of this handicapped him from identifying Iago's villainy.