I don't give a flying fuck what ISIS wants or why they did it

[magical thyme]

Because to worry about their goal is to give them control of our response. Yesterday afternoon, before it had hit DU, I watched for a fraction of second before I had to turn it off. I know exactly what they did. At first I simply wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to turn the entire region into a pane of glass. It took quite some time for me to process my initial horror and rage.

It doesn't matter whether their culture is thousands of years of brutality or whether we caused the brutality by attacking and brutalizing them repeatedly since the west imposed artificial boundaries and its own "leaders" on them. The bottom line is that we broke the ME when we killed Saddam and continued breaking it when we fostered revolutions in the other ME countries.

We may or may not have fathered the monster, but we certainly goaded the monster and set it loose.

Nothing that you or I say or write or protest will make one iota's difference as to how our government responds to yesterday's horror. We are just noise. They are not listening. At best, they will have paid staff that reads and listens, and comes up with ways to counter what we say if it goes against their decisions. I have no doubt there will be a reponse, and I expect it will be violent. I'm ok with that. They must be stopped.

Therefore, I intend to focus on what I want and what I can do. What I want is to get us out of the ME, period.

We can't go cold turkey. It's easy to blame the greed of the oil companies, but the fact is our lives are so intertwined with oil that we would die in large numbers if we tried. Instead, we need to remove it from our lives when we can, in whatever way we can.

Aside from the obvious, we use oil for a lot of things: plastic, car and bicycle tires, mining the metals used to manufacture cars and tires and other stuff, artificial fertilizer to grow food, transport of food, and more.

So what I can do is double-down on what I have been planning, which is to get myself off oil so I am not contributing to the problem. I am focussing on insulating this fall, specifically in the room that loses the most heat and has the potential for a wood stove for backup. Then I will go for alternate heat, water and cooking.

I will continue to reduce what I use of the above, re-use what I can't eliminate or already have (I have 8 year old zip lock bags that I wash after every use), and recycle what I have no need for. I will continue to walk where I can. Instead of replacing the car, which gets 40+mpg even with 235,000 miles on it, I will live with it until it dies, or unless I die first because it will take more oil to make a new car than this one will use. If I'm able, I will move to a place where I don't need a car at all.

I will continue to expand my organic garden so I'm less and less dependent on artificial fertilizer and food transported from outside my location.

I watched the moments lead up to the horror, and watched for a fraction of a second. I know exactly what they did.

He was very brave.

[CJCRANE]

1. K&R.

[Bragi]

2. I care who they are, and why they do what they do

If people don't care about the specifics, they can and will make terrible mistakes that will worsen the situation.

As for your solution -- taking yourself off oil -- I have no problem with it for a whole set of reasons. Do it.

However, I doubt individual action of this sort will do much to extract America from ME politics. For this most part, the problem isn't oil, it's Israel. As long as Israel fails to make peace with its neighbors, and the U.S continues to support Israeli wars and intransigence, then the U.S will remain up to its eyeballs in ME politics. The jihadists will make it so by escalating their attacks in the ME, and by attacking U.S. interests and assets abroad, and in the U.S itself.

Alternately, if Israel could settle with its neighbors, then I think the whole ME region could stabilize, since most leaders in the ME have no reason to allow ISIS to continue to grow in influence, nor do most people in the ME want to live a 12th century lifestyle under brutal rule by extreme jihadists.

Anyway, that's how I currently see it.

[get the red out]

5. I agree

We have to leave the whole ME alone, Israel and all.

[R. P. McMurphy]

3. You're right. Our "leaders" aren't going to . . .

get us out of any of the messes they've gotten us into. We are going to have to force a movement from the bottom-up and changing our lifestyles will be key to doing this since our "leaders" can't seem to get anything done.

[get the red out]

4. I have always believed

That they only way to substantially end terrorism is to end our oil addiction. I prefer to have little to nothing to do with the ME as soon as possible. I hate that region for many reasons. I despise it so much it's time to retreat big-time from the whole thing, oil, all of it. The current mess we are in is reliance on ANCIENT fuel sources. Time for technology.

But the big shots will have to be able to stay rich on new technology for it to get us off oil. Unfortunately that's the world we live in. Hopefully they will think of it as their future fortunes.

[TBF]

6. I look to what we as committed people can do -

because despite republican protests to the contrary the individual actions are not going to make a lot of difference in the grand scheme (yes, one person can make a difference in the life of another - but this is a bigger problem then that and we need a much larger paradigm shift). Getting rid of capitalism, or at the very least sharply curtailing it, is the answer here. No problem with organically grown food and the like - but we need to band together and do it together. And fight the continued capitalism in the same way. Don't accept their chemicals is a fine first step, but they'll just move operations and sell the chemicals in Japan or India instead. We need to bring down the system.