'Zactly. There are PILES of PHP and Perl snippet that filter quotes, or allow Unicode.

I have tried typing Russian (Cyrillic) and Persian (Arabic-derived) into the site in the past. Ouch.

It not even hurt to brand them as crazy and to lock them up in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Like we don't do to common criminals? Gee, you must be thinking of them as something else then, such as a legitimate if hostile power.

That would allow the state to medicate them and in some ways, to make an example out of them.

An example that the Islamic State can point to and say: "See, even our enemies agree that we're not just another gang and are afraid of us!"

Martyrdom? Nope, straight-jacketed and drugged and forced to talk about your feelings. No rewards of heaven for you.

"Our brave fighters are willing to face not only death but humiliation and torture before it! Truly, they shall be blessed and rewarded in Heaven!"

Seriously, stop helping the Islamic State. Stop supporting their story. Every time you suggest a "clever" punishment for them you're supporting their claim of being a Caliphate rather than a criminal gang, thus bringing them closer to victory.

You win a war like this by deciding on what view of reality you want to be commonly accepted, then behaving consistently as if it was. By doing this you're constantly telling a story to everyone you interact with, some of whom will accept it and start repeating it in turn. As the number of converts increases, it eventually reaches the tipping point and becomes the new "default" consensus reality, sweeping even those who originally rejected it in. That's what classic nation-building is about: storytelling. Islamic State is trying to short-circuit the process by baiting foreign powers into lashing out against them, effectively recruiting their enemies to testify for them. Such impatience is a serious weakness, since those foreign powers can as well deny the story. However, given how clumsily Al-Qaeda was handled, they probably thought the risk was worth it.

You know, this kind of basic mechanism should really be covered in elementary education. All our technological and economic might won't help us any more than their muscles and armor helped the dinosaurs if our situational awareness continues being that of a brain the size of a peanut.

I'm impressed.

Point being, my privacy is worth more than 13%.

Just toss these fuckers into the sea and the Great Whites will make them disappear.

But that would play straight to their hand. "Islamic State" is doing things like this because they're trying to tell a story: that they're a Caliphate straight from the dark ages. Treat their agents any differently than a common crazy murderer, and you're saying that you agree they are different, thus putting them a little bit closer towards having their story commonly accepted.

Here, let Littlefinger explain it.

So, what we must do is counter their story with our own: that they're nothing more than a bunch of brutal criminals. And we do that by treating them exactly like any other criminal. Counter the fantasy with banality, don't let them draw us into it. That's the mistake we did with Al-Qaeda: we allowed them to define themselves as "terrorists" rather than "murderers".

Yeah, pretty much. They have shown themselves to be inveterate bullshitters.

While I agree, I'm not sure how much of a transformation happened. If you look at the origins of the CIA, they were about making the world safe for American business pretty much from the beginning. That's not all they did, or do of course. But Allen and John Foster were Wall Street lawyers after all.

Yes, yes I have. But thank you for being a precious snarky asshole.

No, maximizing profit is the goal of a capitalist. An immoral capitalist has no problem with it if it maximizes profit. Now before you get your panties in a bunch, remember that any other immoral idealogue will also tend to have no problem with it if it maximizes their objectives.

The problem is, if you don't institutionalize morality, you get a situation which rewards the immoral psychopathic capitalist and punishes a moral and sane one, and if you do institutionalize it - for example in the form of welfare state - you get hordes of people howling that the state is interfering in the marketplace and creating inefficiencies, which of course is true but misses the point. Capitalism, like any social system, fails when it stops serving human needs and becomes an end to itself, since at that point is has betrayed its very purpose. And it's on the verge of just that.

Sayeth the Anonymous Coward.

Why not include your name, address, and contact info on every post? after all, your "privacy" is not worth the chance that you might someday take a human life, right jackass?

Heh, I was starting to wonder just how old you are!

The fact is slaves are shitty workers. They only work hard enough not to get whipped, and to get that you have to pay someone to hold the whip. Might as well pay them directly.

And yet this lesson still remains unlearnt. Just look at how most companies treat their employees, who respond by putting in the absolute minimum effort they can get away with, and sometimes with outright sabotage.

I think it's because we're still socialized to value domination over cooperation. "Putting someone in their place" feeds the ego of a manager, thus there's some amount of economic reward they're willing to give up to do so. And when every single one of them does the same thing, at every ladder of the hierarchy, you get a horribly ineffective organization.

All in all, a modern corporation is a pretty good approximation of a totalitarian dictatorship: peons are merely squeezed dry as long as they keep their heads down, leaders declare grandious and frankly delusional "visions" that nobody takes seriously but can't call out as completely unrealistic either, everyone inbetween concentrates either on covering their back or stabbing daggers in those of others, and random purges threaten all. Stalin would be right at home in the modern boardroom, and probably a darling and role model of the business world.

Aspartame

That's true, and I was being a little facetious. But a driving force behind the globalization movement is the ability to take advantage of much lower wages in poorer countries to avoid higher labor costs in wealthier countries. If you look at what is legal in those poorer countries, it's not too far from forced or sweatshop labor.