Terrorists Don't Understand They're Making Us Embrace More Of What They Hate

Defiance: Crowds at a London vigil Sunday, basically
telling terrorists to piss offf.

UPDATE: See John Oliver take on this below the video of the guy reacting to the attacks.

Oliver cites this guy and notes that he returned to the restaurant to pay his bill and leave the staff a tip.

I agree with John that this guy is out on the town in London tonight guzzling gin and toniscs and  flirting with every handsome guy he sees.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION:  According to the Islamic jihadists that conduct those awful and stupid and tragic terrorist attacks, like the one in London over the weekend, is that their efforts are backfiring spectacularly.

The extremists think that fun, and music and independent women and free expression and independent thought are all items that must be wiped from the face of the Earth.

Very few people think this way, of course, which is why there are (thank goodness!) relatively few terrorists.

One attack is too many, but the fact that this kind of thing doesn't go on every hour is a sign that the numbers of whacked out jihadists are small.

Jihadists tried to shut down free spirited teen girls by bombing an Ariana Grande concert? Pfft. Grande goes ahead and hosts another mega-concert in Manchester, England, where the original bombing took place.  The concert raised tons of money for bombin victims.

The headline in The Guardian was "Manchester Uplifted By Ariana Grande's Colossal Empathy."

By that we mean, the defiance is not devoid of real emotion and hurt for the victims of the attacks. Want a sample? Just check out Grande's rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" she sang near the conclusion of the benefit concert.

The jihadists apparently hate joy more than anything, so the videos that surfaced of police officers gleefully dancing with youths at the Manchester concert last night must have galled them terribly.

Boo-hoo.

Frankly, the only person I see cowering in the face of these terrorists is Donald Trump, who gets all alarmist, probably for imagined political gain, when something like London happens. He just ends up looking shrill and fearful. What a snowflake!

My favorite reaction to the London tragedy is this guy, in the BBC interview below. He's got it just right. Let's hope the rest of us follow his lead.



John Oliver's take on why Britain is not "reeling."

So What Do We Do About The Idiots Trying To Blow Up The World?

Once again, we're shell shocked by yet another huge terrorist attack. (In case you've been alone in a cave the past couple of days, a coordinated attack by suspected ISIS terrorists on a concert hall, a soccer game and a restaurant/bar in Paris killed more than 120 people.)

We're all going through our usual expressions of sympathy and solidarity to the terrorism victims in Paris.

I'm not disparaging that. Paris needs all the support it can get. They need to know the world is behind them.

I'm just despairing because we've done this sad song and dance so often I've lost count. And we will do it again.

The thing about fundamentalists of any stripe is this: They lack the intellectual firepower that most of us have to live in a world in which people differ from the rest of us. So they use actual, physical firepower to demand everyone adhere to the same crude simplistic beliefs they have.

That's why 129 or so people in Paris were executed yesterday for the "crime" of attending a rock concert, or going to a soccer game, or stopping by the tavern for a glass of wine.

The Atlantic lists additional crimes we are guilty of that Islamic terrorists think should be punished by death. Such as going to a bar in Bali, watching the Boston Marathon or going to work in New York City.

Obviously, nobody knows how to stop people with this hideous mindset.  There's plenty of noisy talk and yelling over what to do. We either ISIS bomb them too much or not enough.  We're either too nice or not nice enough to refugees fleeing the ISIS-polluted Middle East. We're too Islamophobic or not Islamophobic enough.

Our world leaders' understandable inability to quash ISIS and their ilk means we're going to go through tragedies like Paris again and again, just like we saw in New York, London, Bali, Turkey and a whole bunch of other places.

There was probably a method to the madness of the Paris attacks, as there always is. The conventional wisdom, which I buy, is that ISIS wanted to provoke a backlash. More bombing, a big clampdown on refugees, discrimination against Muslims.

That way, they can say claim they are right, the West really wants to get rid of Muslims. It's a vicious cycle.

ISIS, in their fake flowery language, said they were killing western people, people of loose morals, prostitutes as they called the innocent Parisians. Again, because everybody is supposedly expected to be just like the fundamentalists, because their heads explode when people act with freedom and independent thought, and don't adhere to their gloomy, prison like mindset.

Religion through the centuries has done a lot of good in the world. But from the most hard core, rigid fundamentalists, their religion has brought us nothing but suffering, death, oppression and hate. Amazing how much damage a small minority of lunatics can cause.

It's been going on for thousands of years in one form or another, so I'm pessimistic about ever stopping it.

All we can do is defiantly put our freedoms, our intellectual skills, our social liberalism, our independent thought, our quest for peace and our desire for a full and wide ranging life front and center. Especially when something like this happens.

I do like how people initially reacted to the latest terrorist attack in France. When police evacuated the soccer stadium, departing fans spontaneously started singing the French National Anthem.  Across the world, governments lit up famous landmarks with the red, white and blue colors of the French flag, a nice symbol of solidarity with Paris combined with a perfect "fuck you" gesture toward ISIS.

Near the nightclub where the worst of the Paris violence happened, a musician named Davide Martello pulled a portable piano on his bike, set it up amid a scrum of reporters and onlookers, and played John Lennon's "Imagine," that famous ode to peace and tolerance and fairness.

"Imagine" won't change any minds among ISIS, but it is a reminder of what the rest of us need to strive toward.

No, scumbags like the ISIS idiots aren't going away anytime soon.  But neither will the world's majority of people who only want to live their lives, as fully and freely as possible.

This desire is the ultimate and best way to torture the fundamentalists we detest.

I'll let you go with the video of Martello playing "Imagine" on that Paris street yesterday:

No, Public Officials Who Hate Gay Marriage CAN'T Violate The Law

This Kentucky county clerk, (woman on right)
refuses to issue any marriage licenses because
she hates the idea of same sex marriage licenses.  

As a gay, married man, I was thrilled along with a lot of other people when the U.S. Supreme Court said same sex marriage was legal everywhere in the United States.

A number of other people were decidedly NOT so happy with this ruling, including a smattering of county clerks across the nation who are tasked with handing out marriage licenses, to straight couples, and now to gay couples.

The gay marriage ruling puts these clerks in a quandary. Do they violate their deeply held religious beliefs to hand out marriage licenses to Steve and Earl and to Becky and Cindy? Or do they refuse?

Frankly, I have a lot of respect for the few county clerks who have resigned their positions rather than violate their religious beliefs in issuing same sex marriage licenses.

Obviously, resigning from a job is incredibly disruptive, but if they choose to resign to live up to their  ideals, more power to them, even if I don't agree with their viewpoints on gay marriage. At least they are being honest and true to themselves, and that's a rare commodity these days.

What I don't like are the clerks who are trying to weasel out of issuing marriage licenses. When you become a public official, you are charged with upholding the laws. Even if it's a law you don't like.

If you don't like the law, you can work to change it, or you can resign from a job that forces you to obey a law you find disgraceful.

Some clerks have tried to get around this by not issuing marriage licenses to anyone, gay or straight. Like the county clerk in Kentucky who was video'd doing just that. 

Some of these refusnik clerks are probably trying to become these fake evangelical Christian martyrs.

You know the type. They are brought up on say, charges of official misconduct for not issuing licenses, and then they go to the Christianist talking heads and activists groups, and they become a prop to this idea that Christians are being "persecuted" in the United States.

As if anyone is taking away their right to their religious beliefs.

But beliefs have consequences. Mine do, and people might not like me for supporting gay marriage, and being gay married. I have to live with that. You can't be loved by everyone.

Plus, I can't imagine ever getting a job at an evangelical church, not that I would want one there.

Evangelical Christians are doing just fine in this nation, despite what some of them will tell you. These Christianists will say that gays have an outsized influence on public discourse, and that might be true.

But these Christianists themselves have an outsized influence on public policy, given how many of them are in public office, or lobbying those in public office. Or are annoying media pundits. Right, Todd Starnes?

The conservative groups are still trying to find ways to break the law by weaseling all of it, as noted in SCOTUSblog. 

Gay marriage will not be the end of Evangelicals in this country. Far from it. So they can stop panicking and get back to praying, if they so wish.