I'm trying to empathise with them... I get why people become radicals of other kinds... but saying no music, no sex, live by the book, behead those who disagree... what part of that makes people think "I want to get into this, this sounds fun"?

The Arab world has valid grievances, which motivated 9-11 for example, but there's more to it than that.

  • impartial_fanboy [he/him]
    ·
    7 months ago

    I'd recommend the book Engineers of Jihad. It's precisely the people who wish to change the world and then are denied by external forces (largely the U.S. in this case) that are primed for radicalization.

    Also iirc, Bashar al-Assad's father was the one who actually developed the tactic/justification but I'm having trouble finding a source, it's early.

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      "they find that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background, and that Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism, in which engineers are absent while social scientists and humanities students are prominent."

      Sure, we get told that we don't understand muh basic economics, but we sure as hell better understand economics than fascists.

      • SpiderFarmer [he/him]
        ·
        7 months ago

        Given the engineers I've known, that feels harsh on Fundamentalists as a whole.

        • DragonBallZinn [he/him]
          ·
          7 months ago

          I never would have expected CHUDs to be pulled to engineering TBH. Maybe coding, but not the rest of the engineering discipline.

          That being said, I'm pretty sure the CHUDs in civil engineering are more rare.

          • Xx_Aru_xX [she/her, they/them]
            ·
            7 months ago

            That being said, I'm pretty sure the CHUDs in civil engineering are more rare.

            Don't google what degree Oussama Bin Laden has

          • D61 [any]
            ·
            7 months ago

            Makes sense to me, engineering gets your blue collar salt of the earth types to turn a wrench and the white collar middle/upper management types who want to write out instructions that other people get dirty actually doing.

          • NoYouLogOff [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            7 months ago

            This is purely an American perspective, but I failed out of an engineering university, it was a graduate-to-Boeing pipeline.

    • Vampire [any]
      hexagon
      ·
      7 months ago

      thanks for the recommendation

      Hafez al-Assad pioneered suicide-bombings iirc