It depends on how technical you wish to be, or what element you mean to stress. But in terms of moment-defining violence magnitude, and clear-cut glorification of murderous deshumanisation, I think nazism compares more than, say, a Mussolini or Metaxas regime.

Edit : But yeah, when i speak of islamism, here, i mean in particular the "islamic state" version of it, which is its own brand, with which not even al quaeda's version compares...

Thank you Telika!

The novel by Yasmina Khadra you mentioned I managed to find in Dutch, it's called 'De Lammeren Gods'.

The search term 'why do terrorists kill innocent' in Google revealed a lot articles that offer various perspectives, some from a scientific perspective (one coming from Yale, and this one, from https://www.academia.edu/200644/Terrorism_Supreme_Emergency_and_Killing_the_Innocent where I had to sign up with Google as 'indepent researcher', so now I am officially one ;-) ).

Still, it's hard to get myself to motivated to do anything at all, even getting a shower and getting dressed, when people can just surface from the sea or enter a mosque to kill innocents, a mass extinction of species caused by us humans is going on and climate change and peak oil loom around the corner. What does it matter if I get dressed, get out of bed or not? It won't stop those developments. And the world will remain unpalatable to continue living in.

Usually I try to focus on what I CAN do, but right now I'm in shock and in that the terrorists have been victorious today.

Yeah, I generally skip google (and its links to opinion pieces and harf-arsed journalism), and search directly in academic journal websites such as http://www.revues.org http://www.cairn.info or http://www.persee.fr (I don't remember which ones have the most enlish language articles, though). http://www.jstor.org is also handy, if you have academic access to it.

But anyway, terrorism will always "win" in the sense that killing indiscriminately is super easy : no paranoid totalitarian state will ever be secured from random suicide attacks, whatever the motive. But it still doesn't say much. In Europe, it is small causes with big consequences, but still small causes : it takes one moron to commit murders and shake a whole society, but that's still very few people doing it compared to the population. It's not "society becoming crazy". And in Africa, well, it's a nazi-like regime that is waging a conquest and occupation war on various (muslim) populations, but there again the nazi analogy brings some oxygen (nazism was a terrible thing for half a dozen years, but got defeated, shamed, and was probably not sustainable). I expect ISIS to be crushed eventually and to pay for it, even though this won't repair anything. It's a moment in history, and we've been through many of these. And we still will.

At a local everyday level ("war is far") I am more bothered by their indirect ideological success. Terrorism is also about provocation and polarisation, and this works super well on imbeciles, who completely buy on the fundamentalist islamists claims of "we are real islam", and completely participate in the hijacking of 1,6 billion people in an artificial "war" they don't give a damn about. The first target of agitateurs are the lukewarms, those who threaten the very validity of their imaginary wars. Once people will have been polarized into islamists and islamophobes, the terrorists will have won : they will have the war they want, in their own terms, with participants and identities as they define them themselves. And this is quite a succesfully ongoing process. As its taking place on "our" field, we are responsible for that, and that makes it all the more infuriating. That is a war on representation that the extreme-rights (both the islamic extreme right and the european islamophobic extreme-right) are currently winning together. And this discourages me more. Because the ripples of this victory of theirs will last long after ISIS' defeat.

So, I have my own discouragements, related to this. My own pulsions to give up in front of the world's immutable stupidity, and the perpetual repeat of its old fallacies no matter how thoroughtly they get deconstructed at scientific levels. Less about the deshumanization that terrorists are guilty of (for us, a pragmatic challenge) and more about the deshumanization that we are guilty of (which is a self-identity, educationnal, ideological challenge). Terrorism is contributing to dragging us backwards, not that we eed that much help for that... And that frightens me because it's the part that is directly on our own hands, and that we let slip down...

So, that's for my own bitching. And my own nocturnal stare-at-the-ceiling moments...

What made me happy today.

A much more mundane thing to bitch about: The low quality of caps on food containers.

AARRRGH! While lifting the oil bottle today I was a bit sloppy and grabbed it too high so was only holding the cap, of course it came off and oil splashed all over my kitchen. One third of a roll of kitchen tissue later my floor looks shiny.

My favourite juice comes in bottles with thin metal caps that are both hard to open and sure to cut your hand AND will not keep the bottle sealed tight after opened initially.

Would you like it better if they were as bad as aspirin bottles? You need a fucking chainsaw to get into some of those! :P

I use a serrated bread knife to cut the seal off on many offending bottles nowadays.

That's not a bad idea. I gotta try that.

Well well, well well well well well well. well. Well well well. How to say that.

I hardly watch tv, talk shows usually annoy me. The level of television depresses me. Nothing new, nothing dramatic, nothing revolutionary about this judgement : just notorious mediocrity and the yawn that goes with it.

There's one guy that co-hosts or chronicles in one mediocre tv show that I only get glimpses of. Enough glimpses to be forced to admit that -gasp- that guy was actually decent. Like a person, with a brain. IN THE TELLY. It only happened two or three times these last 30 years or so.

Well, it's his last show. He exits the world of tv after, what, three years of semi-activity or so. No direct impact on me, I don't follow that show (but quite a few people around me do), and yet, it annoys me a little bit. It's a bit gloomy. As if there was a representant of okay people, in that sea of orinary tv-level idiocies. It didn't last. It was nice (let's not exagerate, but it's was still a positive feeling) to know that tv was compatible with that. Well, not so much. TV is now it's old regular self.

So, feeling a bit meh about that remote news.

Maybe you two should just unlock the child safety lock...

Yeah and if I could do that I wouldn't be messing with a stupid bottle, I'd be at NASA working on nuclear fission.

Everything in Australia is in child proof lockable lids and some of them need a bloody chainsaw.

If I wouldn't be dumb as fuck I would have Abitur, as it is called here in Germany, and a university degree...

tried getting the abi?

Rainbow flags. Rainbow fucking flags everywhere I look on the fucking internet. I know people are so wrapped up on the expansion of fake rights and fake freedoms to include homosexual couples that they show off symbols of homosexual pride and awareness but the rainbow flag is one of the dumbest ideas out there. First of which, a rainbow is suppose to be an illustration of light refractions. Second of which, it simply looks dumb and makes homosexuals look like pansies, a stereotype many of them despise.

Also, while people celebrate "marriage equality" despite the fact that nothing in the US Constitution gives the federal government the authority to define marriage or to give special benefits or penalties based upon marriage, the US Senate passed the TPP Agreement with "Fast Track" which gives the president dictatorial powers concerning trade deals and further undermines US workers and US consumers. Not that many people care since now gay couples get to have pieces of paper calling their relationships "marriages" in every state.

Also, people whine and bitch about anyone sporting the "Confederate flag" (which is actually a misnomer since the Southern Cross was a battle flag for the Army of Northern Virginia) claiming that it represents "slavery" and "racism" even though there were black slaveholders in colonial America, the USA, and the CSA and the fact that there were numerous reasons for the Civil War contrary to the oversimplified "Yankee" version of the story. Plus Lincoln himself did and said some controversial things like offering to protect slavery in exchange for peace and nobody talks about the enslavement of the Irish in the colonial era, the de facto slavery of European immigrant children, or the enslavement of Europeans through the Barbary Slave Trade and the Ottoman Slave Trade. So now we are suppose to exchange the Confederate flag for the rainbow flag even though the Confederate flag is simply a flag of the southern states and a symbol of rebellion while the rainbow one is simply idiotic.

By the way, I mention fake rights and fake freedoms because it all boils down to perks and penalties assigned by governments based upon marriage. A right is something you have because of your own existence and not because of a license to do something. I will also say that I hope the ruling gets used as grounds to support nationwide conceal carry weapons freedom. I may believe equality is a lie since we are all different but that is an "equality" I would support completely.

Bottom line: fuck rainbow flags. Fuck rainbow avatars. The only rainbows I would be willing to see are the refractions of light.