British SAS and Seal Team 6 forming elite "Avengers"-style hunter unit to smash ISIS.

[Sovereign]

article: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/sas-special-forces-forming-hunter-4097083

Live video feed from IRAQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rn3gm_DEdo

 

[Horizon]

**** yeah.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

After they defeat ISIS, I hope they do something about Thanos.

 

[Sovereign]

For some reason, the live feed keeps cutting after 58 seconds. Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

 

[BLADE]

Is there an actual policy here? Or is this simply Anabasis: Infinity? Violence from a Western policymaking perspective in the region seems to be autotelic. And good lord, the slavering over the fact that our hard men are going over there to kill and be killed by their hard men (to say nothing of the innocent men, women, and children caught in the crossfire) is nauseating.

ISIS is nothing more than the the rictus masque some in the region have adopted after tragedy and farce.

 

[Blaxican]

Think of all the cool actions films this event will loosely/kinda/sorta/well okay artistic licence inspire, though.

 

[BLADE]

When I was not yet a young man, and had yet to put away childish things already my faith (spoiler alert: I'm an atheist) cast a wan shadow in the light of day. I can't quite recall the exact day I "lost" my faith. Did I ever have it? Can one build on to it, agiotage it, derive it, distill it down and then drink a soothing tonic made of something so evanescent? I cannot say. But if I had to pinpoint a moment where my worldview really crystallized it was during after-school yeshiva, where I was training for my bar mitzvah.

A bar mitzvah, you see (and as I suspect even the most Judeophobic gentiles are aware) is more than about becoming a man. It about being bound to the mitzvah --the ethical mores and philosophies that HaShem has bound onto the people. In a way, it was much like a squire donning armor to become a knight. My armor were black reeds of the tefilim whence was written maxims and maxims and worlds upon worlds of the words and deeds Jews (and not a few righteous gentiles) long gone:Hillel and Methuselah, Maimonides and for a secular twist, Spinoza.

They were my grandfather's, as precious a patrimony as land, gold, and blood and in them I squinted to decipher Hebraic (I can only sheepishly admit to a bare proficiency) metaphysics and morality. I clutched at them to learn something that would show me why. It was a childish approach to religious criticism, but it was sincere. And whilst I never did quite find what I was looking for, the parables and songs I pronounced on that day I officially became a man in the eyes of that one community I was a member of stuck with me. The Golden Rule. The Good Samaritan. The totality of mechilot (forgiveness) earned in bone and sinew, but freely given to self and to other.

My favorite has always been the juxtaposition of the wicked and the righteous son. Because it doesn't say much about universal values, or how God, or Jesus, or Cthulhu or what have you have wrought empyrean laws that man durst not sully.

Rather it simply speaks of differing cases.

"We" versus "us;" the righteous son sees that we are inexorably bound, that to speak of the one is to speak of the other. That we keep and are kept by brothers and sisters wrought in bonds more ambivalent and yet no less-strong than blood. The wicked son sows only division and makes nothing but acanthous accounts of his agrarian commune.

What is my point, you ask?

That we have exiled our Muslim brothers and sisters from our global community. I don't speak of neoliberal heuristics, or the smug sloganeering of those who have won and sit at their repast wondering why their company is so thin and wretched.

I speak of our basic responsibility to each other as human beings.

And that is why I do not see a violent response as yielding a lasting benefit.

Think, perhaps, of all the argent film and golden text spun from the exploits of our modern day Argonauts. Think, also, of the movieplex where roods of burnt flesh, of deliquesced innards, of strewn brains putrefying in the afternoon. Cinematically grisly aftermaths of the suicide bombers of the next ISIS targeting that idem movieplex. Will it be here? In Berlin? Or perhaps in Baghdad?

Think of the girl who wants to discover a new enzyme that would help to cure cancer but whose father --in his poverty and wretchedness-- has only eyes for his honor and how the girl's womb might filigree that honor.

Think of the misery we have engendered --certainly not by ourselves-- but to a great extent, and to great culpability.

And then tell me.

Is ISIS the wicked son? And can we commit a lasting filicide?

Will we ever live with ourselves if we do?

Or y'know. Rah. Rah. Explosions.

 

[Blaxican]

I've been playing Spec Ops: The Line lately and it's like. Dude. I'm totally resonating with what you're saying right now.

Also, what do you think would be the most constructive way for handling the ISIS situation?

 

[BLADE]

There are no simple answers, but to try and simplify matters, there are a few policies we can pursue:

- Real development in the Muslim/Arab world
- A real attempt to solve the Israel-Palestine issue
- Energy and desalination technology development in the region (a separate issue from the core issue of alleviating penury in the region)
- A long-term strategy addressing how climatological change will impact the region (many of the conflicts in the region are already water-driven.)
- Containment for ISIS? I made this point in a separate conversation with Brandon that we really don't know how much of "ISIS is worse than Al Qaeda(!)" (though there is certainly a Hitlerian type of dialectic at work in such a construction) is inexorable and how much is the messy process of state-formation.
- What processes of state-violence are actually constructive? It seems rather self-evident that American power projection over the region is less sensible than say sponsoring forces on the ground like Iran and (yes) Bashar Al-Assad.
- A normalization and deconstruction of Western ablepsia and hysteria on the issue of terrorism
- A reconciliation with Russia, and a warming of relations with China --both are necessary and increasingly well-positioned geopolitical players in the region.

Note that none of this necessarily forbears the use of force. Rather it adopts a skeptical position on so-called humanitarian interventions (which have a bleak history in the American case) and emphasizes more long-term engagement.

In the more immediate sense?

I would suggest doing nothing. We might consider arming the Peshmergas, but from both a cold-blooded standpoint (one could draw ISIS into a foolish confrontation with Turkey) and from a humanitarian standpoint (weapons protract conflicts) the path of least involvement seems wiser.

At least for the moment.

 

[Horizon]

So.. What about them killing people.