Really, Bernie Sanders?

I'm trying to believe in Bernie Sanders. However, on Face the Nation just now, I couldn't believe what I heard him saying. Maybe it makes sense to someone here:

Sanders believes that climate change is partly to blame for terrorism. Why? He said because if we have droughts, it causes people to be out of work and causes unrest. The terrorists take advantage of the unrest. Then Sanders was asked how this has anything to do with the attacks on Paris. After fumfering (sp) around, he had some crazy answer about people moving into the city. Then they quickly changed the subject.

This thinking of Sanders' worries me.

"Climate change is directly related to the rise of global terrorism," Sanders said, adding that it would cause nations to start "struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops, and you're going to see all kinds of international conflict," ABC News reported.

Sanders backed up his statement by mentioning what "the CIA says," a likely reference to a July 2015 report from the U.S. Department of Defense that found "global climate change will aggravate problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions that threaten stability in a number of countries," according to a news release.

https://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/bernie-sanders-connects-climate-change-to-terrorism/

yes, hate, I heard all that. Those hypothetical issues are sure to cause internal problems. How to deal with terrorism was not addressed, in my mind.

I'm not sure those are merely hypothetical issues, since he is basing them on a Pentagon report warning about these concerns in relation to national security.

Once people aren't able to feed their families, that level of poverty will push more people to more radical religious views, and on and on. I didn't see the interview you did, but when he said somewhat the same thing in Saturday's debate, it sounded logical.

Only the press would try to try to take such a macro view on climate change and terrorism and try and apply it directly to a two-day old terrorism event, which seems a bit lazy although sadly not surprising. ISIS doesn't need climate change to destabilize that region, they already had our recent wars and nation building to do that for them.

The more I see and hear of Bernie, the less likely I am to vote for him.

Climate change can cause food scarcity. Starving people are easily manipulated by religious fanatic or other cult leaders. Some poor, uneducated white people in this country can't find jobs, can't make ends meet, but if they hear a philosophy that identifies some "other" as the reason they don't have enough, they can be convinced to do harm to this "enemy." And that's where white supremacist skinheads come from in the US.

I am taking some of these points further - so would I be correct to infer that what's being said here is that due to the desperation of some of the population, for the reasons mentioned, these people would start believing in the twisted logic of terrorists and then turn to mass murdering our citizens?

I don't know.

"An" not "the." Imagining a single "the" leads to simple solutions like militarism, because theoretically it doesn't take long to obliterate a "the."

I was using one very specific example not for any reason other than I think our tendency to speak in terms of broad generalities degrades the level of discussion on this board.

And the specific incident that inspired the thought was the white skinheads who were apprehended in Boston a number of years ago. They wanted to bomb Boston's Holocaust Memorial because, you know, they were poor working class people who couldn't get anywhere in life that had to have somebody to blame. They fell in with an anti-Semitic skinhead group and voila.

Just trying to explain my though process as to how I came to post what I did.

"...would I be correct to infer that what's being said here is that due to the desperation of some of the population, for the reasons mentioned, these people would start believing in the twisted logic of terrorists and then turn to mass murdering our citizens?"

That plus the twisted logic of male privilege which is only reinforced behind bars. I know my share of men who are either incarcerated or have done at least one bid. They've been brutally honest with him about two rules of survival in the joint. The first one is... fight or f*ck, and the other is...you're either the alpha dog of the clique or a beta bitch.

Terrorism is horrible right along with prison rape. I don't claim to understand all the conditions that could lead mainly young men to perpetrate either act. But, when you have a toxic brew of massive unemployment among the perps, a strong sense of alpha-male entitlement, identity politics, and a history of victim-hood, in the context of the penal system or a 7th century belief system that basically ignores a woman's person-hood, bad shaite's likely to happen. For some reason, pent up frustration, gang-induced bravado, and religious zealotry cause some boys and young men to become feral.

We only need to ask ourselves why the US armed forces almost exclusively place young men in combat roles, sparing women and elderly men. Ground forces tend to be made of young virile men, be it under a flag or fatwa. My dad, who is a veteran, believes that there is sweet-spot in which young men can be rather easily cajoled to take the lives of others. Somewhat related, Baltimore City has registered 300 homicides thus far this year, the highest level since 1999, with more than a month to go.

My dad, who is a veteran, believes that there is sweet-spot in which young men can be rather easily cajoled to take the lives of others.

I would like to see some data on this.

"Are you f*cking kidding me with this? Try health concerns and physical limitations...."

Women and elderly men are perfectly capable of killing other human beings. Interestingly enough, during the US civil war, the Confederacy had no minimum age of enlistment and neither side enforced the maximum age limit of 45.