Thursday 24 March 2016

What Terrorists Want - and How to Stop Them Getting It

After every new atrocity or catchy ISIS video the armchair psychologists and amateur Islamic theologians take to the air. Their low grade psychobabble turns tragic events into compelling TV narrative and brings mainstream attention to political opportunists. But even if it made better sense it would still be irrelevant. All these pundits are focused on the wrong thing: how particular individuals are recruited to terrorist groups and causes.
Source

Terrorism is not a personality type, a psychological illness, a theology, or a goal in itself. Terrorism is a technique, a particular form of warfare that the weak wage against the strong.

If we want to stop terrorism we have to first understand it. That means acknowledging its rationality as a means to an end. The question we should be asking is, what are terrorist acts supposed to achieve and how?

Thursday 17 March 2016

The Concept of White Privilege Does More Harm Than Good

'White privilege' and its cousins have achieved enormous prominence on the American left, from which it now seems to be spreading around the Western world. As a slogan it has an undeniable rhetorical power. But from a moral perspective it is flawed: at best mistaken about the core problem of racial injustice and at worst racist in its own right. At the political level it is divisive - arguably deliberately so - and thus incapable of supporting the consensus needed to build a just society.