Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Why suicide bombers are dying for revenge

By John Ballard



I stole the headline. It says it all.
This article describes an easy to understand dynamic which most people would rather ignore.





In 2006, psychiatry professor Anne Speckhard from Georgetown University and psychology professor Khapta Akhmedova from Chechen State University profiled the Chechen black widows like Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, 17, and Markha Ustarkhanova, 20, who attacked the Moscow metro. Looking in depth at a sample of 26 female bombers, they concluded that the death of a brother, a father or the rape of a female relative at the hands of Russian soldiers had traumatized every woman in their sample, and formed the motivation for their behaviour.


"They do not appear coerced, drugged or otherwise enticed into these acts.




On the contrary, they are self-recruited on the basis of seeking a means of enacting social justice, revenge and warfare against what they perceive as their nation's enemy. All the women in our sample had been deeply personally traumatized and bereaved by violent deaths in their near families or all about them, and we believe this formed the basis for their self-recruitment into terrorist organizations."

�






"...what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland."

H/T Abbas

This article analyzes the female bombers from Chechnya responsible for the Moscow subway attacks. Is there any reason to believe the same dynamics are not at work elsewhere?

What about "Yankee, Go Home!" is hard to grasp? 
For survivors -- regardless of the circumstances -- all the politics, foreign aid, and good intentions in the world will never make it better.
COIN, you say?
KMA.



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