Conversation with Haley when the news segment about it came up:
H: Why are there so many police and fire trucks?
M: Becasue somebody bad did something bad. They are there to help the people who were hurt.
H: Bad people are bad.
M: And we don't like it when bad people do bad things.
H: We're Earth and we all live on Earth. People should be nice to each other.
A four year old can figure this shit out. The innocence and naiveté of a child is something that we all could only wish for. As Bill Burr put it, "Do you know what toddlers hate? Naps."
Nationalists in the US, UK, France, and elsewhere keep this going, they're ISIS recruiters. Their war on terror is as effective as the war on drugs. Trillions of dollars that only harm society and the world economy. Stop making the same mistake over and over again, it doesn't work.
Link and Aarslev were intuiting what scientists who study radicalization are coming to see.
"The original response was to fight [extremism] through military and policing efforts, and they didn't fare too well," says Arie Kruglanski, a social psychologist at the University of Maryland who studies violent extremism. "That kind of response that puts them as suspects and constrains them and promotes discrimination — that is only likely to exacerbate the problem. It's only likely to inflame the sense there's discrimination and motivate young people to act against society."
Their approach has a basis in research on interpersonal relations as well.
Christopher Hopwood, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, studies something called noncomplementary behavior. Complementary behavior is the norm. It means when you act warmly, the person you are with is likely to act warm back. The same is true with hostility. But noncomplementary behavior means doing the unexpected. Someone acts with hostility and you respond warmly. It's an unnatural reaction, and it's a proven way to shake up the dynamic and produce a different outcome from the usual one.
The nonviolent resistance movements of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi are the most well-known examples of this tactic. The Aarhus model is another. How did it unfold in real time? Consider the case study of a young man we call "Jamal." Jamal is not his real name, and we don't usually use pseudonyms, but he asked us to not use his name. He doesn't want to be known as a person who almost became a terrorist. He wants a job and a life now.
Nationalists in the US, UK, France, and elsewhere keep this going, they're ISIS recruiters. Their war on terror is as effective as the war on drugs. Trillions of dollars that only harm society and the world economy. Stop making the same mistake over and over again, it doesn't work.
While I don't disagree, I wonder how much of this stops with "the war on terror". How much of it is related to the vestiges of their (our - I'm half French after all) colonial past? How much is related to the widening economic disparity between the haves and have nots. How much of it is a mix of the three?
How do you go from being an innocent toddler who only hates naps, to hating people so much that you feel compelled to mow hundreds of people down in a truck? Shooting people in a bar? Blowing yourself up at a checkpoint? It's not just religion. It's not just despair. it's not just culture. I can't understand it.
And it makes me sad for the future and especially sad that eventually, one day, my kids will lose their wonderful, beautiful, precious innocence.
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