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An overlap of what?
You are saying that the fact of terrorists showing a lacking in empathy for the people they kill can be equated with autistic traits.
A terrorist does not become a terrorist because he has a lack of empathy, he becomes a terrorist because he feels that his cause is just.
What you are looking at in the terrorist is psychological problems, where the autistic has genetic problems.
If it were a similar gene structure to that of the autistic that were responsible for the psychological make up of the terrorist, then there would be a strong link between autism and criminal/violent behavior. There isn't.
That's like saying that because terrorists have beards, that all men with beards have terrorist tendencies.
There is no overlap whatsoever
people who do have these mutations would be unlikely to be drawn to the activities of the group, or be able to cope with the unstructured reality of terrorism, this is unlikely.
It is much more likely that terrorists share the same psychological problems that soldiers suffer from, or that of the troubled teenager psychology, where the feeling to be a meaningful part of something can be manipulated.
It might be irrelevant to you, but this is because you are not on the ground being targeted by drones that kill suspects without due process of trail. Without due process of trail there is no defining a target as being anything but a civilian.
The USA cannot relentlessly bomb a city without civilians being targeted. So the USA targets civilians not accidentally.
I think you would benefit from watching the documentary that I recommended below
Wrong! The USA and the UK went to war with Iraq under false pretenses and down right lies.
The USA 'is' killing civilians on purpose. You cannot relentlessly bomb cities and expect people to accept that civilians are not being targeted.
They don't call it terrorism, they call it collateral damage.
If one is conducting a justifiable war, targeting innocent civilians, at a pinch, could be classified as collateral damage, but the war on Iraq, and the continued conflicts across neighboring regions was not, and is not a justifiable war, unless you call the long term business plans of the private investors in the war machine justifiable. I don't.
I think that there is justifiable evidence that these people who are long term invested in the war machine are directly influencing world scale politics, and that it is they who are directly responsible for the killing of civilians on purpose.
Surely it is clear that these people, these shadows of war, must indeed have a greater extent of mental defects than anyone else involved
How do we, 'the general population' who are responsible for funding this fiasco, manage to simply close our minds to that bit of business? It's fu*king ridiculous! Do we lack empathy? Are we genetically impaired? Do we have PTSD? Have our cities been bombed? Oh, yes that's right, there have been a few bombings, and innocent civilians were killed, where when we do get bombed we are outraged and call it terrorism. What would we call it if a whole city got bombed? Would that then be classed as 'proper' war? Would we class their 'proper' war on us as being justified?
[Use of language is decided by the people using it.
The vote seems to be 3 to 1 at the moment.
Maybe just say mildly autistic. And use a psychological journal for predisposition of autistic adults to crime.
Quote from: timey on 30/05/2017 21:23:27An overlap of what?Things they have in common which are not common to the rest of us.
You're still confusing autistic people with them rather than restricting things to the area of overlap and shutting out the rest.
That is not killing civilians on purpose and the US is absolutely not killing them on purpose - you've been influenced by propaganda which originates from people who are actually involved in deliberate killing of civilians - my Facebook newsfeed is full of the stuff, and most of it is created by people working for people like Assad, Putin and terrorist organisations - they are systematically trying to fight the west through propaganda, aiming it at pacifists and playing the victim.
Maybe don't use the word "autistic" at all- because there's no reason to suppose that the killers were autistic.
Quote from: David Cooper on 31/05/2017 19:56:38Things they have in common which are not common to the rest of us.FFS!Like what?
Things they have in common which are not common to the rest of us.
The only claims you have made seem to boil down to "Autistic people don't understand suffering- so they could kill without worrying about it."
But the whole point of terrorism is to cause as much grief as possible (for example, by picking a crowd of young girls at a concert).
And the actual report of the Mancs bomber is that he was a pub-going footballer.
Why even mention autism in this connection?
I am somewhat confused by your replies tbh, because on the one hand it is you who are saying that the traits of a terrorist overlap with the traits of the autistic, but then you say:Quote from: David Cooper on 31/05/2017 19:56:38You're still confusing autistic people with them rather than restricting things to the area of overlap and shutting out the rest.If there was a link between autism and terrorism, murder and killing being the overlap, because that is what terrorists do isn't it? Then there would be a statistical link between autism and murder. There isn't I cannot stress that strongly enough!
Autism is a genetic condition that can cause the sufferer (and their family/carers) great personal distress. I do kind of resent the inference that autistic people would be more drawn to fanaticism, and take um-bridge at your suggestion that the autistic person's lack of empathy, which in most cases is due to a social ineptitude born of not being able to differentiate between stating that which is obvious, and that which people would obviously rather didn't get stated ...
...anyway I take um-bridge at your suggestion that the autistic persons lack of empathy can be equated with the type of lacking in empathy that any person needs to employ in order to kill another person.
But to state that there is an overlap between the traits of a terrorist, and the traits of an autistic, is both completely false and a thoroughly wrong in all kinds of different ways.
I truly wish you would find some other terminology to equate the type of lacking in empathy that 'any' person needs to employ in order to kill another person with the perceived lacking in empathy of the autistic... stating terrorists as being semi-autistic is misleading and insulting to autistics. In any case, I've said my piece and I'll say no more on autism...
I have watched no such thing David. I refuse to watch propaganda from any side, including our own UK news broadcasting.
All these documentaries are the product of Independent Journalism from the West.
If you 'had ' watched these documentaries you would remember them.
The logic states that the general public is the one who is funding the business interests of very powerful people who stand behind short term government puppets who lobby for their interests, and visa versa ... and media spin cons the public into believing that the need for a huge defense budget is justified. People who make machines of war are happy, and the only way they are going to stay happy is if there is more war. That is the big picture.
And what people who are not on the ground in these countries seem to forget is, that if you go to someone else's house and start trying to tell them what to do, and start taking goods out of their stores for your own profit, and adding insult to injury expect them to do all the housework for a pittance, the people who live in that house are going to get a bit uptight... It is their stuff in the stores, and it is their house after-all isn't it?
If the war machine is a privately invested industry, (which if you watch "Shadow World" the names of these private companies are given, and if you watch "Child Soldiers Revisited, you will see the atrocity of the USA defense bidding scheme), then the only business plan available for these industries is more war, where wars are then not the result of conflict - it is conflict that becomes the requirement for precipitating war.
Take away the 'enemy', the war machine is not necessary, and the public money is spent on better things.
And so long as we don't go taking actions in houses that are not ours that are going to make it's occupants uptight.
It is really important to understand that it is the general public who are responsible for determining who the enemy are, and it is the general public who are responsible for making sure that people do not go and tell other people what to do in their own houses...
Is there a cure? For a start it might be a world class idea to respect people, their houses, and their right to have them.
And while I do not condone the terrorist attacks in any capacity, I really cannot differentiate the difference between a man being beheaded on YouTube by terrorists, and a 'suspected' suspect being sentenced to death without due process of trial, and then being killed by remote drone attack without due process as to accurate personal identification.
Or a high rise building being bombed with families and children,
It all seems much of a muchness to me and will only perpetuate more of the same and worse.
Oh, but it has some things in common with a circle and therefore shares a connection which justifies the use of the word.
Like the two things I've repeatedly mentioned which you're apparently incapable of registering.
Both groups have severe difficulty empathising with others, and there is likely a shared genetic cause for that.
When they kill Yazidis, they don't care about terrorising anyone - don't be misled by the etymology of the word terrorism. They simply want to exterminate them.
Which disqualifies him how?
the thing that stops most people becoming killers of innocent people
he is the kind of person who gets hooked into the most literal interpretation of holy texts in a manner which ordinary people don't
these people are more susceptible to becoming terrorists because they are wired differently.
Because there is an overlap with autistic traits, it makes sense to use the description semi-autistic,
but if you can suggest something better that doesn't take a couple of paragraphs to get across every time it's used, I might switch to that.
If our Prime Minister was a mass-murderer who sent troops to your house and disappeared people you care about, would you condemn foreign governments for trying to intervene and remove the mass-murderer from power? I doubt it.
Moderator interventionI have received an entirely reasonable complaint that the assertion of a causal link between autism and terrorism is not justified.David: please either provide statistically sound, peer-reviewed evidence of your hypothesis, or withdraw it. I appreciate that there may be some difficulty as terrorism is not defined in UK law and autism is a clinical diagnosis with no primary legal implications (it is not a reportable disease), but "I believe...." is religion or politics, not science.
Terrorists and goalkeepers generally have two legs- why not call them semi goalkeepers?
Quote from: David Cooper on 01/06/2017 20:41:18When they kill Yazidis, they don't care about terrorising anyone - don't be misled by the etymology of the word terrorism. They simply want to exterminate them.Again, that's not an autistic trait.
Because they are both clearly social activities- which are anathema to those with autism.
Actually, the classic way to teach people to kill is to claim that the victim is not an "innocent person".
Quote from: David Cooper on 01/06/2017 20:41:18these people are more susceptible to becoming terrorists because they are wired differently. Citation needed. (still)The evidence shows the opposite, and that your so called "reasons" are either false or a red herring.
In the same way that it makes sense to call them semi goalkeepers and that Frisian cattle are semi dalmatians.
How about "Misguided fools"
Failing that, how about any phrase that's not insulting and misleading?
I think that I might be very suspicious about the bigger picture and these foreign governments long term intentions, when it is clear that the foreign governments who are trying to intervene and remove the mass-murderer from power are the same foreign governments who were involved in friendly relations with the mass-murderer previously, while knowing that he is a mass-murderer.
Anyway, I can see that you are entrenched within the cycle of hatred. That people are dying and being killed because there is something wrong with people is without question. But more killing ain't going to solve it, nor does killing conducted by one side have anymore moral high-ground than the killing on the other-side does.
Asking what is wrong with people is a good line of inquiry, but your direction towards targeting vulnerable people with genetic impairments as sharing the same type of lacking in empathy that i required to kill people is highly questionable.
Analysts who study war and social structures warned that the long term foreign interference in the Middle East would result in 200 million or so Muslims hating our guts as a normal psychological reactionary progression, no genes necessary. I don't think we are quite there yet, but continue the cycle of hatred and we will be.
I will not be answering again because I resent that you infer that I am the victim of being told what to think.
...and the spread of religious fanaticism as due to genetic impairment is by far the easier and less intellectual approach.
Quite where one would take this idea of genetic impairment into the field of anti- terrorism is somewhat worrying, reminiscent of the concept of cleansing and lessons that 'should have already been learned' as a matter of historical importance, where genetic cleansing would be the same thing as ethnic cleansing, or religious cleansing, and to adopt this type of thinking puts us in the league of having the same type of thinking that we are attributing to the terrorist.
I'll point out that there is nothing propagandized about understanding that a war machine that is a privately invested venture, and employed by government, has a long term business plan...
I referred to Milgram's classic experiments (repeated in various forms by many others) that demonstrated how perfectly ordinary, average people drawn at random from the population can be persuaded, by using only four phrases, to torture and kill others against whom they have no grudge.
I'm talking about a distinct category of people who are not autistic but who do share some key features in common with autism
The reason it's important to refer to the overlap is to draws attention to the point that these terrorists aren't evil, but have a genetic problem and can't help being the way they are
And for the Nth time, I'm not talking about autistic people.
Where in Milgram's experiments did he get people to kill anyone? These experiments have very little relevance to the issue because the whole setup involves them knowing they're taking part in an experiment in which they have a full expectation that no one intends anyone to die or be significantly damaged. All that is tested is their trust in authority and they don't believe at any time that they're acting on the orders of killers. The connection with the topic here barely even qualifies as tenuous.
The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electroshock generator, which played prerecorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage-level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
I have made no assertion of any link between autism and terrorism - if people insist on warping my words, that is not something in my gift to correct.