“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag"

You aren't very bright if you don't get when I am being satirical - I know what man bites dog means.

 

When's the last time someone has posted a thread about the tragedy of the NOrth Korean people? Or the suffering of Africans - and how we have to do something and it's such a big problem

When people talk about Libya it's to talk about benghazi or spreading freedom or how Obama mucked it up. No one talked about Libyan lives and how much blood was spilt. Hardly ever if not never.

So please, stop bsing.

 

Your metric is how many threads have been started in the D&D?

 

Maybe one of the Muslim countries can light up its landmark with their colors? Too bad they are all busy hating each other.

How awesome would it be if Saudi had the decency and balls to light up the Kabaa in French colors?

 

"Important" is a relative term and it's clear how you're using it to frame your argument. Is Paris more relevant to me than Beirut? Yes, it is. It's the capital of a country that has a similar culture, societal structure and historic connection to my own country. Its streets have also been devoid of this kind of violence since WWII.

Beirut? The "Paris of the Middle East" has seen this type of violence more frequently. In fact, Lebanon's political instability, recently inauspicious location and violent tragedies make this lamentable, but not surprising. It's directly next door to Syria and has absorbed tons of refugees. This is tragic, but not shocking.

So, yes, Paris' cultural connections to the West and peaceful existence for the last 70 years make this hit closer to home than another terrorist attack in a country that has been producing similar headlines for damn near 30 years.

 

A simple glance at the news would give you an example of this:

 

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The problem here is that you aren't very bright, so no one gives you the benefit of the doubt when you say stupid things because there's no telling if you are accidentally saying stupid things or intentionally saying stupid things.

Work on posting intelligent things more often so it'll be more clear when you are being intentionally stupid.

 

Do you seriously have to be that rude to make a point? geez man

 

The posters here are right, they don't deserve prayers like France does.

 

Oh for ****s sake, nobody said that.

All of this death ****ing sucks. It's a shame the world is so desensitized to it. Sometimes it takes death in an atypical place for us to take notice. That in and of itself is sad. But to think there's some kind of duplicitous agenda in mourning is quite a stretch.

 

Normally I would agree with you... But not in this case, NewYorker isn't bright and is rude... He had it coming.

 

My metric is the the vacuum of concern brought up for the deaths of Muslims from terrorist attacks here. You claim it exists, I say show it.

 

So if a place is known to have more violence in the past it means the lives there should not be mourned like the lives in a place where there is less death?

Why is it that most of the people I see talking about France or changing their flag on FB are white, and minorities are less likely to do it? There's clearly a racial divide here. I think you are getting closer to the real reason here. That white people here see the French as similar to Americans but more ethnic looking people are not.

When Mumbai was attacked there was not the outpouring of shock or mourning like there was for Paris - Mumbai is the New York City of south asian. There had not been any kind of attack in the city like that before.

He has a point? No. He is just mad because I tore him a new one in many debates and he is still butthurt.

 

I visited Beirut in the mid-'60's when it was commonly referred to as The Paris of the Middle East, and it deserved the title. The place was almost like a Western city, with high rise apartments and office buildings, wide tree lined boulevards, nice shops and restaurants, at least in the eyes of this young tourist. That it has largely fallen into ruin, chaos, and a playground for militias financed from Assad's Syria, the mullah's Iran, and other actors in the region, including some considered "friends" of the United States, is a great tragedy.

Yet what happened in Paris remains stunning. For those of us that have visited that fair city several times, the feeling is not to compare Paris to Beirut, but to compare Paris to New York, Washington, and San Francisco. Beautiful, important, internationally admired cities we Americans sometimes take for granted. For the French, it is similar to 9/11. Not on that scale, or involving such landmark buildings, perhaps, but acts of violence that the French, and the rest of us who love Paris, see as attacks on our civilization, our way of life. An assault on a citadel of Western culture.

What made Beirut special in a physical sense was destroyed decades ago. The people, bless them, remain. Perhaps it is too easy for us to not give those acts of violence there the attention they deserve, but it should be very easy for the people born of Western culture to know why what happened in Paris means so much more to us.

 

"People I see" is not sound evidence. You're trying to invoke white guilt here by pretending to be obtuse about why Westerners feel more culturally connected to Paris than Beirut for reasons other than race.

You've been given explanations of "newsworthiness" by Ottomaton yet dismiss them to pursue a racial angle. While that surely could be an underlying, subconscious motivator (as it is for all humans when the tribal part of our lizard brain seeks association in times of duress), I doubt there is a concerted effort among white Westerners to go out of our way to appear overly sympathetic to white victims instead of brown ones. At least we didn't discuss that at the last meeting I attended...

"Facebook activism" is an entirely different topic that goes deeper than this thread. The Internet as we know it, and all of the megaphones it provides, was different in 2008 during the Mumbai attacks. There wasn't an outpouring of support "like this" for the Barcelona train attacks, the Grozny school massacre, the Nairobi bombings, the Tokyo subway attacks, the.....

You're seeking to impose an agenda on mourning. All loss of human life in acts of terrorism is senseless and tragic. Would all of this be made right for you if Facebook applied a profile photo filter for every country of the world? Something tells me it wouldn't be.

 

I saw it and those are certainly the deadliest attacks and horrible.

That doesn't change the statistics which I didn't make up.

Are you really that idiotic that you see posted and collected from government agencies and falsely claim over and over that made them up?

I don't know what's happened to you. I hope you get the help you need.