Agnus_Dei posted:in the best case scenario, IS is offering them a more painless death, and then cutting off their heads afterwards. this would explain why the beheadings are not on camera.
i don't think they're even dead never mind beheaded
daddyholes posted:im really interested in this thing Petrol posted about Islamic State saying that the sotloff video was an unauthorized leak from inside....
i think it's possible they've already killed and made videos for all of the different captives they have and intend to only dish them out in reaction to american military activity, as if they were a direct response to it.
daddyholes posted:someone sure did. you. thanks for playing the race card yet again, midge.
i must have missed it. apologies
Agnus_Dei posted:daddyholes posted:im really interested in this thing Petrol posted about Islamic State saying that the sotloff video was an unauthorized leak from inside....
i think it's possible they've already killed and made videos for all of the different captives they have and intend to only dish them out in reaction to american military activity, as if they were a direct response to it.
they only had a limited amount of time for filming. Better Call Saul was scheduled to use that lot for some Tuco meetup scenes later that day
ilmdge posted:i must have missed it. apologies
your incredible racism will not go unavenged. i'm hacking your node as we speak.
The British father-of-two facing death at the hands of Islamic State fanatics has spent his career as an aid worker helping to protect innocent civilians across the Third World.
For more than two decades, David Haines has travelled with aid agencies through Syria, Libya, the former Yugoslavia and South Sudan.
He has dedicated his life to promoting peace in places of violent conflict and has overseen projects to save civilians from land mines.
The 44-year-old has been described as a hero by his family, who have been inspired by him to travel the world themselves on aid missions.
Mr Haines was born in Holderness in East Yorkshire, before being brought up in Perth, Scotland, by his parents Herbert, 77, and Mary, 79.
He studied at Perth Academy before, at the age of 17, joining the military where he enjoyed a 12-year career.
Despite getting married to his first wife Louise when he was 22 – and having his first daughter five years later – Mr Haines was determined to continue working across the world to help civilians trapped in war-torn countries.
Between 1999 and 2004, he was at a German NGO helping to revive abandoned villages and to return refugees to their homes after the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
The work led to swift promotion and he left a few years later to become an independent consultant, spreading his experience in dealing with security to various charities and organisations.
He worked as a consultant director for manufacturing company Astraea, based in Croatia, and went to Libya three years ago, working with Handicap International on demining programmes.
A year later, the aid worker travelled to South Sudan, where he was a security manager for Nonviolent Peaceforce, a civilian peacekeeping group.
Wanting more freedom and a shorter-term contract, Mr Haines left to join French non-governmental organisation ACTED, or the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development, which works to support civilians affected by wars, natural disasters and economic and social crises.
He was with the organisation in Syria when he was kidnapped with a colleague in March last year by IS forces near the Atmeh refugee camp, by the Turkish border...
Mr Haines is believed to have been abducted in Syria along with Italian aid worker Federico Motka, 31, who was also doing relief work for ACTED with Syrian civilians affected by conflict.
Mr Motka was released in May. He said he had been tortured and moved six times.
Afterwards, an ACTED spokesman said: ‘Our thoughts go towards all of those, humanitarian workers and journalists among others, still held hostage in Syria and throughout the world.’
Superabound posted:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/wiping-out-islamic-state-impossible-julie-bishop-20140907-10dmty.html posted:Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has warned that destroying the marauding Islamic State group entirely will be "impossible" and that it may become a long-term threat similar to al-Qaeda.
Reflecting the immense difficulties facing the West as it wrestles with how to stop the militant group creating terror in the Middle East, Ms Bishop said the Islamic State (also known as ISIL) is an ideology as well as a military force and will therefore survive efforts to stamp it out.
She was speaking after the United States sought to quell lingering uncertainties about its goals and strategy for Iraq and Syria by announcing at a Nato summit the establishment of a 10-country "core coalition" – including Australia – to tackle the Islamic State.
Asked whether that coalition's goal was to destroy the group, Ms Bishop told Fairfax Media on Sunday: "I think that's impossible … Have we destroyed al-Qaeda?"
Agnus_Dei posted:slavoj wrote a thing http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/isis-is-a-disgrace-to-true-fundamentalism/
fucking lol
Editors' Note: September 5, 2014
After this essay was published, a reader pointed out that several sections had originally appeared, in identical or substantially similar form, in Slavoj Zizek's 2008 book, "Violence: Six Sideways Reflections." The New York Times does not ordinarily reprint material that has been previously published; Op-Ed contributors are asked to affirm that their work is original, and exclusive to The Times. Had The Times known that portions of the essay were copied from an earlier work, it would not have accepted the essay for publication.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/dec/30/comment.media
2006 Zizek posted:A decade or so ago, there was an outstanding British commercial for a beer. Its first part staged the well-known fairy-tale story: a girl walks along a stream, happens across a frog, kisses it, and the ugly frog is miraculously transformed into a beautiful young man. The young man then casts a covetous glance at the girl, kisses her and she turns into a bottle of beer. The girl fantasises about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer.
For the woman, her love can turn a frog into a beautiful man, while for the man love reduces the woman to what psychoanalysis calls a "partial object", that in you which makes me desire you. The actual couple of a man and woman is thus haunted by the bizarre figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. Modern art stages this underlying spectre: one can imagine a surrealist painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer entitled "A man and a woman".
And therein lies the threat of cyberspace at its most elementary: when a man and a woman interact in it, they may be haunted by the spectre of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. Since neither of them is aware of it, these discrepancies between what "you" really are and what "you" appear to be in digital space can lead to murderous violence.
http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/10/3/483.full.pdf+html
1998 Zizek posted:A recent English publicity spot for a brand of beer enables us to further clarify this crucial point. Its first part stages a well-known fairytale anecdote: A girl walks along a stream. sees a frog, takes it gently onto her lap. and kisses it; of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn't over yet: The young man cast a covetous glance at the girl, draws her toward him. kisses her–and she turns into a bottle of beer, which the man holds triumphantly in his hand. For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signaled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence (in Lacan's mathems, the big Phi); for the man, the point is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (in Lacan's mathems, the object small a). On account of this asymmetry, there is no sexual relationship. We have either a woman with a frog or a man with a boule of beer. What we can never obtain is the "natural" couple of the beautiful woman and man. Why not? Because fantasmatic support of this "ideal couple'' would have been the inconsistent figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. (Of course. the obvious feminist point would be that what women witness in their everyday love experience is rather the opposite; one kisses a beautiful young man and, after one gets too close to him, when it is already too late, one notices that he is effectively a frog.) This, then, opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through our very over-identification with it–that is, by way of embracing simultaneously, within the same space, the multitude of inconsistent fantasmatic elements.
Each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing: The girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. What modern art and writing oppose to this is not objective reality but the "objectively subjective" underlying fantasy that the two subjects are never able to assume, something similar to a Magrittesque painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with the title "A man and a woman" or "The ideal couple." (The association with the famous surrealist "dead donkey on a piano" is here fully justified, since surrealists also practiced a version of traversing the fantasy.) And is this not the ethical duty of today's artist–to confront us with the frog embracing the bottle of beer when we are daydreaming of embracing our beloved? Does the artist need to stage fantasies that are radically desubjectivized and which can never be assumed by the subject?
This, then, is the point we were aiming at all along. Perhaps cyberspace, with its capacity to externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, opens up to the artistic practice a unique possibility to stage, to "act out," the fantasmatic support of our existence, up to the fundamental "sadomasochistic" fantasy that cannot ever be subjectivized. We are thus invited to risk the most radical experience imaginable: the encounter with our "noumenal Self," with the Other Scene which stages the foreclosed hard core of the subject's Being. Far from enslaving us to these fantasies and thus turning us into desubjectivized, blind puppets, it enables us to treat them in a playful way and thus to adopt toward them a minimum of distance–in short. to achieve what Lacan calls la traversee du fantasme, "going-through, traversing the fantasy."
So let us conclude with a reference to the (in)famous last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muss an schweigen” (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent).
What's Slovenian for "irony"
littlegreenpills posted:if some major newspaper agreed to consistently pay you money for literally anything wd you bother with original content or recycle your college papers
I would just watch anime all day and rip off anime sub-plots because no one would believe a Highly Regarded Big Man Academic would be plagiarizing anime and anime nerds would be easily dismissed when shrieking about the sanctity of anime as an art form. It's the perfect thought crime.
AmericanNazbro posted:littlegreenpills posted:if some major newspaper agreed to consistently pay you money for literally anything wd you bother with original content or recycle your college papers
I would just watch anime all day and rip off anime sub-plots because no one would believe a Highly Regarded Big Man Academic would be plagiarizing anime and anime nerds would be easily dismissed when shrieking about the sanctity of anime as an art form. It's the perfect thought crime.
the fundamental paradox of language is embodied in the chocolate cornet. which side of the cornet to eat from? the "head" of course, but which side is the head? depending on whether you imagine the cornet to look like a seashell or a caterpillar, it could be either! now imagine four chocolate cornets at the edge of a cliff. ideology works the same way.
c_man posted:AmericanNazbro posted:littlegreenpills posted:if some major newspaper agreed to consistently pay you money for literally anything wd you bother with original content or recycle your college papers
I would just watch anime all day and rip off anime sub-plots because no one would believe a Highly Regarded Big Man Academic would be plagiarizing anime and anime nerds would be easily dismissed when shrieking about the sanctity of anime as an art form. It's the perfect thought crime.
the fundamental paradox of language is embodied in the chocolate cornet. which side of the cornet to eat from? the "head" of course, but which side is the head? depending on whether you imagine the cornet to look like a seashell or a caterpillar, it could be either! now imagine four chocolate cornets at the edge of a cliff. ideology works the same way.
lol I see you read zizeks essay in Mapping Ideology too
HenryKrinkle posted:Crow posted:in re: Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
the Saudis aren't currently fans of the MB and have sent massive amounts of aid to Egypt after the coup by Sisi. in fact this anti-MB stance has gotten them into a tiff with pro-MB Gulf states like Qatar.
right, that's what i'm talking about, no mention of the GCC, nothing actually concrete or material, just ahistorical stuff about eternal struggle between the house of saud & wahhabi clerics.
Reuters posted:Obama could order airstrikes on an expanded list of targets within Iraq and has been considering strikes in Syria as well, on condition that moderate rebels there be in a position to hold territory cleared of Islamic State fighters by the strikes.
HenryKrinkle posted:Strategy on Islamic State includes support for Syrian opposition, Iraq: White House
Reuters posted:Obama could order airstrikes on an expanded list of targets within Iraq and has been considering strikes in Syria as well, on condition that moderate rebels there be in a position to hold territory cleared of Islamic State fighters by the strikes.
$10 bucks says he's just going to bomb the PKK while claiming to be "trying his darnedest to stop isis" that is until they manage to overthrow assad and destroy hezbollah. Aw shucks, golly gee, those wrascally wahabists keep alluding us, continually driving away in American made humvees and tanks right *before* we arrive. They're just too slippery for us, I tells ya'