So those who do pander to those concerns end up winning the vote, and then they can trash our civil liberties. This is precisely how we British have ended up voting to leave the EU.

There has been a significant increase in the frequency and effectiveness of terrorist attacks in Europe. People are growing more worried about it. We need to make those people feel safe again, and we're not going to do that by saying "my privacy is more important than reducing terrorism".

The argument you make at the end is the strongest point: on the one hand we are nurturing terrorism by not dealing with the fallout of globalisation, and our governments have been sold an expensive algorithm that they believe can handle the problem, when in reality it will make us even less secure. Meanwhile, the media can sell more advertising with the increased attention, so they're quite happy to add fuel to the fire.

However, all these arguments end up being lost in whether it will work or not, and the Donald Trumps will always win that argument because they go to a lower denominator. If we want to win it, we need to show more genuine empathy.

You are absolutely right. That is the wrong dichotomy to make.

The message should be "you cannot reduce terrorism by taking my privacy; you maybe can reduce terrorism by acting on the terrorists".

A lot of this has to do with the fact that people in general are very tired of a situation where criminals and illegal immigrants cannot be deported. For instance, in my country, an asylum seeker was convicted of violence and firearms offences but couldn't be deported nor detained; eventually he went on to a shooting rampage to murder his former girlfriend and kill four of her colleagues shooting around at a mall, using a pistol he obtained illegally from the Balkans.

Action by politicians? Make it more difficult to get a legal permit for a firearm.

In addition, when people say "solutions" what they mean is "something that doesn't inconvenience me or require me to do anything".

However if you want "real" solutions, here are some:

1) Start denouncing ALL religion as the force for stupidity that it actually is. "I believe in an imaginary sky being with no evidence and you can't convince me otherwise" should be LAUGHED AT as the absurdity it is.

2) Get everybody off of petroleum so that there isn't any money for people to fight about over in the middle east.

3) Quit supporting dictators and bombing countries for geopolitical reasons.

4) Start fixing double digit unemployment rates instead of making them worse with "free trade" agreements that only allow companies to use open borders while preventing workers from doing the same.

5) Make mental health care a much bigger priority than it currently is.

Unfortunately, these solutions don't feed into people's preconceived biases and xenophobia and don't put more money into rich people's pockets. So they are all non-starters.

1) Religion is not really the problem. There are a over a billion muslims in the world, and a little more than that who are Christians. The percentage of each that are involved in violence, even major wars, is so small to be statistically insignificant (definitely less than 1% or even 0.1% (or even 0.00001% if you just consider terrorists)). When religion does come into play its typically in a more ethnocentric way - e.g. religion-as-race.

2) most of the current problems, including those coming out of iraq, were not due to 'petroleum', but rather internal rebellions and foreign interference that is probably more political/ideological than financial in nature. A certain mindset might attribute a lot of the problems in the middle east to politicians a decade earlier seeking to win elections by looking tough on dictators, but not having the willpower to deal with the aftermath of their intervention.

The other points are good, though blaming 'freetrade' as the cause for unemployment and/or other financial troubles is probably a bit simplistic.

It very much is.

Most religions promote "us vs them" attitudes that make people think that anything can be done to the "them". The religions in the US also give birth to our "domestic terrorists" but they don't get called that because 1) they are white and 2) "Well, they just kill baby killers, fags, etc. so they kinda deserve it."

I don't see calls to deport Baptists, thank you very much.

Religion needs to finally get terminated. Period.

> but rather internal rebellions and foreign interference that is probably more political/ideological than financial in nature.

Nobody would care about most of those dictators if there wasn't enough money involved to make them important. See: Africa. Nobody really cares one iota about genocide or terrorism in Africa as it has no importance.

> though blaming 'freetrade' as the cause for unemployment and/or other financial troubles is probably a bit simplistic.

The issue isn't "freetrade" per se. It's the fact that the corporations get to be transnational while the workers don't get to cross national borders anywhere near as easily. So, the corporations get the benefits while the workers get shafted.

I'd argue for example that Christianity is only peaceful these days because the states that are predominantly Christian are also the most prosperous. And, if you want an example of what atheists do during times of hardship, look to soviet Russia or even Nazi Germany.

As for why middle eastern dictators matter more than African dictators to the west (basically the US), it's possibly because, on the international stage, your partially right: the middle east was initially interfered with because of its oil, but also because of its proximity to Russia. And today's conflicts are not about those reasons but the legacy of those reasons, I would say.

There's nothing about being an atheist that promotes hatred. There isn't a holy text for Atheism that tells people to believe or do things.

Besides, it's a tired argument without merit: https://michaelsherlockauthor.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/the-a...

Hitler had his ideology, Stalin his manifestos etc - they all had their own, unique 'holy book' or similar that justified their crimes and it would be a mistake as you've said to somehow link them all as being from a common position.

And yet Hitchens and possibly you do the same thing in the opposite direction: despite the average ISIS member having as much in common as your, say, average US muslim as a nazi might have to a 1917-era russian communist (next to nothing) - you are arguing that their religion, not their idealogy is at fault.

You might argue that the various holy books of faiths cause a problem: for as much as the bible and the (far better written) quran espouse love and joy etc etc they both also include a fair amount of violence. But these books have been rewritten, multiple times, and are constantly being reinterpreted. Blaming the text for the actions of the reader seems harsh.

I guess ultimately the problem I have is that people who say religion is the problem and it should be banned seem to me to be worryingly similar to those that said computer games should be banned in the 90s. A very small amount of people committed atrocities, and all of a sudden it was the games 'promoting violence and hatred' that needed to be stopped, rather than people confronting the more nebulous and difficult issue of culture surrounding the criminals that made them more susceptible to hate and sociopathy.

I did NOT say banned. That way lies madness. Freedom of religion

However, it should be treated with disdain and scorn by the majority. It should not be a safe refuge for the unthinking.

On the other hand, there is nothing in atheism that can possibly say that anything is wrong. If the material universe is all that exists, humans are fundamentally no different from mosquitos or rocks. Killing a handicapped person because they inconvenience you cannot be seen as essentially worse than burning a leaf. In short, atheism provides no reason to do or not do anything other than "because I want to".

By contrast, if someone claiming to be a Christian wants to commit murder, they can only do so in opposition to the explicit commands and teachings of Jesus and of the moral laws they claim to believe.

By no means does this imply that "Christians" will always behave better than atheists. But at least there is ground for defining what it means to behave "better" and to argue for such behavior.

That is right, but I suspect, that if it weren't for religion, people would find another narrative, to create a "us vs them" attitude. Nationalism is an example that comes without religion, racism is another, and I suspect a plentitude of isms, that can be used for that.

I think, religion is mereley a vector for marginalization, not the problem in itself.

Taking responsibility can put an end to a lot of bad things happening in todays society. Doing whatever without having to face its consequences is the root cause of such behavior that causes harm to people.

You could have constitutional measures controlling the way that wars were funded. A simple example: simple outlaw any kind of deficit spending by the national government. Another: a mechanism by which the release of funds could be tied up under legislation supervised by a third party such as the judiciary. [You could have a war chest, but encode it in a law such that the money could only be released if a senior court ruled that the release satisfied self-defense criteria.]

One of the reasons that the original United States constitution (Articles of Confederation) was replaced by the current one was related to military funding. In the old system, it was difficult to raise an army for shared purpose (e.g. fighting the revolutionary war) and there was potential for states to go to war with one another. The issues raised by that period will be familiar to anyone following European integration projects. Some hard-line libertarians in the US remember the Articles of Confederation fondly, because of the limits it imposed on government power.

1) Most modern societies are becoming increasingly secular.

2) Global warming demands that we get off of petroleum as much as possible anyway.

3) Not poking our nose into geopolitical nightmares is quite doable, thanks. Bush Sr. sure showed how it was done.

4) You can fix massive unemployment or you can get violence out of young men. This is pretty simple cause/effect. If young men have no prospects, they never settle down and you wind up with a large disgruntled population segment with nothing to lose.

5) Mental health care needs to be better. Period. This includes the young and the old.

One of you is answering the question "What should the government do about popular fears of terrorism, which might cause the government to lose elections?".

You're in violent agreement that the easy answer to question 1 doesn't solve question 2, and the easy answer to question 2 doesn't solve question 1. Why not moot some other answers to those questions, instead of sitting on your high respective horses?

Treat terrorism as just another crime, nothing special, nothing existentially critical. Nothing to fight a war against the entire world over. Governments already have the tools they need to fight terrorists without limiting encryption, they simply choose not to use the tools they have, because they would rather use terrorism as a pretext for grabbing power.

With regards to "Treat terrorism as just another crime, nothing special," I feel that the problem with terrorism, as it is called is the fact that it is coordinated and targeted. It is more like "organised crime" but it has the specific goal literally of creating terror, whereas the interests of organised crime are purely commercial and if you don't get in their way they won't get in yours.

The issue is with people going around creating terror in a coordinated way, which undermines the authority of the state, and many people's feeling of safety.

Of course that still leaves the question of how do you respond to it, but simply "accepting that the potential for crime, even mass murder, is a necessity for a free society" is similar to me to accepting that a waterfall software development model is a natural emergent phenomenon, inevitable and should thus be embraced. It's a mode of thought that never has a happy ending.

Just to yank myself back on topic again, terrorism is thought to be similar to a child who wants his way and keeps escalating negative attention seeking tactics to the point where you either acquiesce (thus reinforcing the negative behaviour), or you smack the child (at best only a temporary solution, that could lead to further escalations if not sooner, then later in life - could even put you in front of a judge).

"Smacking the child" is what the west has been trying so far.

My personal opinion is that there is no universal generalised "third option", though intricate behavioural theories abound. I would take the opinion that every child is an individual and must be dealt with, and respected as such. It may be as simple as giving them something else to occupy themselves.

Should people have the right to communicate with one another without government interference? Does encryption undermine the state in a similar way as terrorism, or is it merely an extension of the existing right of people to be (to quote the US Constitution) "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects from unreasonable search and seizure" ?

I concede that reasonable people can disagree with where the line should be drawn (given different states and different philosophies about the proper nature of government) but I don't think it's that absurd to insist there should be limits on what any government can know about its citizens.

Unfortunately, there have been too many demonstrated cases of governments abusing the legal limits given to them, so I have no reason to expect that greater surveillance powers would be used responsibly. When it comes to weakening encryption, they're not "smacking the child," they're smacking every child and hoping they'll hit the right one sooner or later.

But that is "using" technology. Not "crippling" it. I am sympathetic to the needs of the state, and I believe there should be some attempt to meet these needs, but with oversight, and with proper procedures and protections.

It's one thing to say James Bond doesn't have time to call back to 'M' to get permission to plant a bug but James isn't a massively industrialised automated spying operation. I'd give him sole dispensation on national security grounds but that doesn't scale up to the level that GCHQ and NSA were doing. The more actors involved the greater the possibilities for systematic abuse and that has to be acknowledged, and those questions answered.

But law enforcement already has ways of doing its job without getting new surveillance powers. They can find people on Tor, they can pay for exploits to get into cellphones, and there always seems to be obvious (in hindsight) dots that could or should have been connected, leading to a terrorist plot, which rarely seem to involve encrypted communications.

I want terrorists stopped, but i'm not convinced that governments can't stop terrorists even with the existence of encryption.

I know it sounds cliché to say that, but I'd rather see my gvt taking actions on things that could easily be improved. For instance, many teenagers smoke in front of every high school in my country. I see that as a much bigger threat than terrorism, and one that is much easier to address.

If we look historically, people do feel safer if people dressed like military are walking around with fake/unloaded guns. It worked very effectively after 9/11 to make people feel safe in airports, and the lack of any "real" weapons helped in eliminating the risk of having people with guns around large group of people. However that only worked as long you can keep up the illusion and keep people in the dark.

It might simply not be possible to create security that is effective, cheap, and make people feel safe.

And yes, that is more important than a vague attempt at reducing terrorism because your privacy is your liberty and without it democracy and free society crumbles.

Which ironically, is pretty much what islamic extremists want.

This is important to understand.

Also it is important to understand that right now Europeans are losing security for no good reason:

We could help a lot more refugees in surrounding countries than we can integrate here. It is really that simple IMO.

Seens we are allowing this stream of immigrants not because we are good-harted but because we are stupid.

This means we could be more secure and help more refugees if we stopped playing for cheap political correctness points and started to think about how we could help as many as possible.

We are squeamish because we do not want to send young men and women to die in some godforsaken country, doing god know what for god knows how long.

Remember the last time that happened? Oh yes, the Iraqi occupation that seem to go on forever and forever, draining the blood and treasure of the United States.

Either we pay it now, or we pay it later.

All this while propping up despots in Saudi Arabia who run the most backward extremist regime in the world by far and make the former 3 look teadybearish in comparison.

These upstanding 'allies' are principally responsible for the global spread of wahhabism, extremism and terrorism in both financing and ideology over the last 30 years.

By a strange coincidence SA is also the west's best friend in the region. Ergo since the foreign policy division of the US and EU cannot be in any way or form characterised as naive they are in effect promoting terrorism on one hand and expending billions building the infrastructure for totalitarian surveillance security states on the other.

Millions of lives are being destroyed because of greed. The more things change the more they remain the same.

The people who come on boats to Europe are mostly not Syrians. They are from the vast lands stretching from Senegal to Morocco to Congo to Egypt to Syria to Iraq to Pakistan to India to Bangladesh, and they are not travelling to Europe because one particular place is very bad; they are travelling right now because they realize that it's about the last time to get a foothold Europe before the gates close, i.e. the current asylum process changes.

(I've met dozens and dozens of underage asylum seeker boys when arranging football trainings for them; they started to hang around in the neighbourhood and I realized it's better if they have something to do, so set up some games every week. Only a couple of them were from Syria. Many more were from Afghanistan and Iraq, but the list of source countries is very long. Mostly these boys are from middle-class families in countries that have some war but mostly just a very corrupt government, and the families have selected those who are able-bodied and have better language skills to seek for a future for themselves and possibly for the whole family, through the well-advertised family reunification programs.

The poor don't get to travel; the cost paid to people smugglers is somewhere in $5000-10000 range but the cost has been decreasing as the people-smuggling business commoditizes.)

I wasn't aware of that fact.

For instance, in Britain, the largest numbers of asylum seekers came from Eritrea, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan and Syria as fifth. In Ireland, the largest groups were from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Nigeria and India. In Italy, the largest source countries were Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal and Bangladesh. In France: Sudan, Syria, Kosovo, Dem. Rep. of Congo, Bangladesh.

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

Wait, what?!

The Iraq occupation is what caused this madness. The solution is certainly not doing another one.

To the extent the recent actions (or inaction) of the West can be blamed, you can blame it on getting rid of Saddam, or you can blame it on leaving Iraq too early, or you can blame it on policy in Syria. You can't blame it on sticking around in Iraq. Iraq was getting objectively better after the surge -- a (flawed) democracy was emerging, the economy was taking off, violent deaths were way down from their peak.

You can argue that Maliki forced the US out and let the country go to hell (in which case "deposing Saddam" is the Western sin), or argue that the US could have stayed if it wanted (in which case if you're a Democrat you can blame it on "deposing Saddam, because we couldn't stick around forever," and if you're a Republican you can blame it on Obama wanting to get out before the job was done to score political points.)

Other than that, though, you're left with earlier Western actions (Bush I, Sykes Picot...) or Assad or Maliki or every crazy Wahhabi cleric in the region of you want to give Arabs some credit and capacity for self-determination too.

A simple way to change this would be to discourage the pattern where people smugglers send a rubber boat to the Mediterranean and instruct the people in it to puncture it on sight of an EU rescue vessel because then they have to be transported to Europe. Change this so that the people are rescued and returned to the port of departure. You don't have to kill anyone, or hurt anyone, just disincentivize the people smugglers who are currently making a lot of money (and likely are contributors to political decision-makers who's come up with the current rules of engagement).

At the moment, we are creating incentives for more migrants to travel, and more of the source countries and communities to send their most active members to get a foothold in the perceived lands of opportunity - when in reality, there are no jobs for them here. We are not helping refugees, we are making a great disservice to the communities where the migrants come from.

Aside from the fact that zero people have thus far been killed by Islamist terrorists in Germany (since...I'm not sure when), every single incident was perpetrated by one person acting entirely on his own. And the thing in Reutlingen which keeps getting lumped in was a "normal" murder.

No amount of domestic "anti-terrorism" law enforcement would have the slightest impact on any of this, not until you crank it to the level of a genuine police state with zero freedom.

Also remember that Allied resistance in occupied Europe during WW2 was able to bomb military targets, produce submachine guns from scratch and distribute propaganda, while under heavy physical surveillance by the Nazis. Thus we know that practically any police state will not be able to stop determined fighters.

No need to steam open letters and read them physically, phone taps which can automatically surveil entire cities making connections between people, cameras able to follow people's vehicles without carefully coordinated follow teams. Who knows how the resistance would have faired under those conditions.

How about media abuse of the word "terrorism". I can imagine any decent professor at any decent university of politics to choke a little when he hears about "another terror attack".

While the definition is not agreed upon globally, in order for it to be a terrorism, the attacker needs to be sending or demanding a political message to be heard or implemented by a country he or she used violence against.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism

But they are pushing envelope for a well known reasons. The government has different set of rules and tools to fight "terrorism" than for example, a domestic abuse case. If things will continue the way they do, pretty soon your drunk neighbor that hit his wife will be called a "terrorist".

In a very real sense, the media is causing the demoralization / fear in the US / West. Given we will spend trillions(?) of dollars fighting the terrorism that we ostensibly believe is causing that demoralization (due to its real harm on the country), why aren't we spending any trillions against the media? Not to censor the media directly, but, say, giving news outlets millions of dollars for every happy or accurate story they write, if we're going to spend that money anyway.

The fact that you're having to "hold back" is sadly indicative of why debates on sensitive topics like this are turning into echo chambers. I suspect that many who hold the minority view keep quiet to avoid being yelled at.

I don't intend to take sides here. I've only ever come here to read and understand other's opinions on topics that seem too complex to tackle on my own. I have a lot of respect for this community, but sadly its becoming harder and harder to keep reading.

For example, you make some good points here but it takes tremendous effort to consider them on merit because the language in which they're expressed sounds condescending and attacking (even though you say you're holding back).

I do hope that you, and anyone else reading this, will not take this personally and instead reflect upon the virtues of more open and tolerant dialogue. And very sorry for singling you out; it's not just you.

I didn't mean I was holding back from something sinister, but from making detailed and thorough arguments. Because I was only highlighting some issues with the Devil's advocate position, I used short points with rhetorical flourishes.

I agree none of this was conducive to a well-reasoned and objective debate. Often I don't consider I'm writing for an audience that comes here to learn - perhaps in future I should.

And if his views were genuine, would you then be rude? I find this implication troubling and corrosive to open discussion.

>It is the media attention given to the situation, not the situation itself, that is terrifying. Europe is extremely safe and does not have a security problem.

I couldn't disagree more. If such incidents were rare two decades ago and increasingly common today, then clearly something is going wrong. In fact, you try to make that same argument later in your post, saying that we creating the terrorism through our actions and making ourselves less safe. Which one is it?

There's a difference between self-inflicted harm and violence inflicted on strangers. Terrorist attacks in France over the last year are almost 50% on top of the normal murder rate. And while most murder victims are killed by people they were in personal conflict with, the victims of terrorism are random. There is good reason to fear them more.

Be it Ireland, Spain or Germany - the 70s, 80s and 90s had a way higher death toll from terror in any given year.

We had the RAF in Germany, ETA in Spain, IRA in Ireland/Britain and so on. Not to talk about Securitate in Romania and so on.

So statistically speaking we non the less have to fear less then our parents had to fear.

I am not saying, that we should just ignore it. No - on the contrary - but first we shouldn't give in to the media crazed panic and throw our freedoms in front of this Angst-Train.

We should identify the problems, look for valid solutions and then fight the causes, not the symptoms. In my eyes having our nations (living in Germany) export war and terror into the world, then take in the refugees without helping them cope with what they went through is a recipe for disaster.

We should take in refugees, as this is just basic humanity calling, but we also have the obligation to help these people with more then "just" shelter.

We also have the obligation to elect leaders wo are not trying every day to set the world on fire. Maybe in the long run this would help a "little bit" as well.

And yes - one might call me a naive idealist.

That is just plainly wrong. In the 70ies, 80ies and early 90ies we had more terrorists and more terrorist attacks, that killed people. There was the (P)IRA in Northern Ireland, the ETA in Spain, the FLNC in France and the RAF in Germany, and these were only the most notorious groups. All of them laid down their arms and integrated into civil political groups in the past 40 years.

No, I would have been more extensive and detailed in my answer. Instead I went for a few short points in rhetorical language.

The other reply to your comment has addressed the other points.