American Couple Believing 'Evil Is A Make-Believe Concept' Bike Through ISIS Territor

[SannaBarBrah]

If only the grainy potato quality video had the audio of what their reaction was when they realized the world is not exactly like the Small World ride at Disneyland.

[Mr Beer]

> doesn't prove evil exists
> proves that murderous terrorists will stab you even if you approach with arms open to help them

so, how would you define "evil" then?

I go back and forth on whether evil really exists or not and that's partly because I'm not sure exactly how to define it.

If it exists, yeah murdering passers by for kicks certainly qualifies.

[QuickNutkus]

Bro - it was an opportunistic killing! Like if you were walking down the street and saw $100 bill, you'd nab it up in a heartbeat. Does that make you evil?!?! No!

Same thing here, these were just murderous terrorists driving along when they saw an opportunity to stab someone in the chest. That doesn't make them evil so much as they had a opportunity!

notsrs.. would like to know answer as well

Im not Mr.Beer, but I'll say this.

Are two communists getting killed on islamist grounds by islamist really an act of evil? I would say no. It's an act of nature.

[Discworlder]

Nominate them for a Darwin award.

[Bassackwards]

sorry libs but the real world isnt a fruitpoia

[MyLastSerenade]

I don't know where they're from. Just found out they had kids, though. A serious wtf...just leave your kids and ride ****ing bikes across a warzone?

A collective that doesn't believe in personal responsibility, nothing is thier fault and selfish to the core.

[ack33]

"If you kill your enemies, they win"

[rectifryer]

Im not Mr.Beer, but I'll say this.

Are two communists getting killed on islamist grounds by islamist really an act of evil? I would say no. It's an act of nature.

fukin lol m8

[Dave22reborn]

Play stupid games....win stupid prizes?

[Tamorlane]

That's too bad, they sound like good people but incredibly ignorant. I suspect some type of cult or religious influence:

"You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are axe murderers and monsters and worse.

I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it's easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it."

[ichBinBerliner]

ISIS holds territory in Tajikistan?!

1) I thought ISIS was defeated. Do I really need to bump Trumper threads stating ISIS was defeated?
2) Can anyone outline the territory held by ISIS in Tajikistan?

[i3oosted]

Bet he wishes he was back looking at that gray rectangle in his office now.

[NYPat]

ISIS holds territory in Tajikistan?!

1) I thought ISIS was defeated. Do I really need to bump Trumper threads stating ISIS was defeated?
2) Can anyone outline the territory held by ISIS in Tajikistan?

Obama said ISIS was a JV team, are we seeing the same thing over again?

[ichBinBerliner]

Obama said ISIS was a JV team, are we seeing the same thing over again?

I need to bump the MAGA "ISIS has been defeated" threads. Apparently they control parts of Tajikistan. Looks like while Trump was busy tweeting, ISIS took over southern Tajikistan. Crazy.

[Impureclient]

^ Now I understand why people are blocked in here.

[Xinroth]

ISIS holds territory in Tajikistan?!

1) I thought ISIS was defeated. Do I really need to bump Trumper threads stating ISIS was defeated?
2) Can anyone outline the territory held by ISIS in Tajikistan?

Isis was only defeated in Iraq.

If you're making fun of Trumpers because they keep hailing Trump for defeating isis, then you are correct. But ISIS still has a foothold, especially in Syria and they still carry on terrorist attacks occasionally.

[Benji Snap]

Reading the end of his very last blog post from his website is kind of eery because of how strongly it was foreshadowing what was to come next.

пожалуйста, he begs. Pozhaluysta—please!

He's welcome to take a photograph of us riding by, but he seems to want a photograph with us. We apologize, smile, and keep riding.

Five hundred meters later, a sedan passes. It stops up ahead and the man gets out. Before we're even in earshot he's miming shutter-presses and mouthing pozhaluysta, pozhaluysta.

We pass, a little more peeved than the last time. Fewer smiles. I shake my head back and forth. He reaches for the back of my bicycle and I bark a firm nyet! in his direction. We ride on.

We don't make it very far. A gold sedan skirts by us once more. It parks up ahead. This time, two men exit the vehicle. They stand in the middle of the road blocking our path. Pozhaluysta! the first man says, and I can't tell if it's an earnest plea or a cruel sneer. In Russian, a lot of things can sound like a cruel sneer.

Nyet! we shout. Leave us alone!

Lauren's in front and she threads her way in between the two men. She keeps going. I make to follow. I gnash on my pedals, lean to the left, and get in between them.

And then the man on the right pushes me off my bike.

[leafs43]

Its easy to make fun of these poor naive people, but they have lived their entire life in a bubble.


Most take for granted the freedom, for a lack of a better word, to walk down the street all your life without having to worry about someone murdering you in broad daylight.

[US_Ranger]

I don't know where they're from. Just found out they had kids, though. A serious wtf...just leave your kids and ride ****ing bikes across a warzone?

I was sitting in the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan once waiting for a flight and saw some blonde American woman with her 2 kids sitting there also waiting for a flight. Apparently she was vacationing in Afghanistan with her kids. (srs)

No idea what ended up happening to her. Maybe they made it out, don't know. You can't fix stupid though.

[US_Ranger]

A young American couple who took a year-long bike trip around the world, believing that evil was a make-believe concept, took a fatal route through ISIS territory in Tajikistan, where alleged ISIS terrorists stabbed them to death.

Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, 29, quit their jobs last year in order to make their trip. Austin was a vegan who worked for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; Geoghegan, a vegetarian who worked in the Georgetown University admissions office.

Austin had a personal blog on which he wrote in June 2017, “I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige. I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned. Too many thunderstorms went unwatched, too many gentle breezes unnoticed.”

Their trip, which lasted 369 days, took them from the southernmost tip of Africa in Capetown, South Africa, to Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Montengro, Kosovo, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and finally Tajikistan, where they were murdered along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands.

While in Morocco, Austin wrote:

You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are axe murderers and monsters and worse.

I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it's easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that's quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.

Austin also had some contemptuous words for President Trump:

On the television across the room, Al Jazeera plays softly. Donald Trump has just announced his plans to move an embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the Muslim world is visibly upset. Leaving Rabat a week earlier, we'd pedaled right by a massive peaceful demonstration against the relocation. The television broadcasts footage of protests just like that one stewing up all across the Maghreb, the Middle East, and beyond. As a clip plays of a sullen Trump waddling across the screen, I do my best to disappear into the soft plush of the couch cushion behind me. But American as we may be, no one here seems to mind.

Then, on July 29, 2018, as they were riding their bikes with two other cyclists in Tajikistan, five men exited the car and stabbed all the bicyclists to death.

The New York Times reported:

A grainy cellphone clip recorded by a driver shows what happened next: The men’s Daewoo sedan passes the cyclists and then makes a sharp U-turn. It doubles back, and aims directly for the bikers, ramming into them and lurching over their fallen forms. In all, four people were killed: Mr. Austin, Ms. Geoghegan and cyclists from Switzerland and the Netherlands. Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill “disbelievers.”

CBS News added, “ISIS followed an initial claim of responsibility in print with a video showing the five purported attackers pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

Damn, RIP Sillie.

You lived in a good life in your gated neighborhood where crime doesn't happen.

[fleeceitout]

If only the grainy potato quality video had the audio of what their reaction was when they realized the world is not exactly like the Small World ride at Disneyland.

I imagine it would be something like this still.

[i3oosted]

At least the children will still have their biological father.

[Mr Beer]

I was sitting in the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan once waiting for a flight and saw some blonde American woman with her 2 kids sitting there also waiting for a flight. Apparently she was vacationing in Afghanistan with her kids. (srs)

:facepalm:

[Streetbull]

Live in low crime lilywhite suburbs, and this is the mindset.

And THIS is how Democrats get any votes at all...

[Streetbull]

Its easy to make fun of these poor naive people, but they have lived their entire life in a bubble.


Most take for granted the freedom, for a lack of a better word, to walk down the street all your life without having to worry about someone murdering you in broad daylight.

Minus the zombies, the world would look something like a mega episode of Fear the Walking Dead or the original, without law enforcement.

It pisses me off when people like those two pass judgment on cops trying to maintain some kind of order in places like Ferguson, Detroit, Baltimore, or Philadelphia. These places are violent sh!tholes! The worst is when some crack dealing murderous gang banger flees the cops while throwing down his sidearm: “Today, yet another innocent unarmed black man was shot down by police as he fled.” Then the camera goes to some welfare queen lamenting how ‘he was such a good boy’ and ‘they could have stopped him some other way’, all while her and some shyster lawyer figure out how much of a settlement to get from the their city.

Sorry to say this but those two idiots asked for trouble and they got it.

[djfuzzy]

That's too bad, they sound like good people but incredibly ignorant. I suspect some type of cult or religious influence:

You're probably right, we should start classifying leftism as a cult.

[SpeedCheeser]

I go back and forth on whether evil really exists or not and that's partly because I'm not sure exactly how to define it.

If it exists, yeah murdering passers by for kicks certainly qualifies.

"e·vil
ˈēvəl/Submit
adjective
1.
profoundly immoral and malevolent.
"his evil deeds"
synonyms: wicked, bad, wrong, immoral, sinful, foul, vile, dishonorable, corrupt, iniquitous, depraved, reprobate, villainous, nefarious, vicious, malicious; More
noun
1.
profound immorality, wickedness, and depravity, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.
"the world is stalked by relentless evil"
synonyms: wickedness, bad, badness, wrongdoing, sin, ill, immorality, vice, iniquity, degeneracy, corruption, depravity, villainy, nefariousness, malevolence; More"



"Evil, in a general sense, is the opposite or absence of good. It can be an extremely broad concept, though in everyday usage is often used more narrowly to denote profound wickedness." -Wikipedia


If you feel like it needs a supernatural force to influence an individual's actions, then I'd agree that evil doesn't exist; however, I do believe there are profoundly wicked people out there perpetrating heinous acts without remorse that I believe can be described as evil, and in that sense I think it's obvious that evil does exist.

[BullStampede]

Only intelligent people would fall for something so stupid. This disease is spreading throughout the West. We need a big wake up call, and fast.

[ichBinBerliner]

Isis was only defeated in Iraq.

If you're making fun of Trumpers because they keep hailing Trump for defeating isis, then you are correct. But ISIS still has a foothold, especially in Syria and they still carry on terrorist attacks occasionally.

lolwut? All I have heard for the last few months from Trumpers is ISIS has been defeated.

Anyways, can anyone point out the ISIS held territory in Tajikistan?

This information seems to be only known to Trumpers ITT

[ichBinBerliner]

lolwut? All I have heard for the last few months from Trumpers is ISIS has been defeated.

Anyways, can anyone point out the ISIS held territory in Tajikistan?

This information seems to be only known to Trumpers ITT

lol....the negs from Trumpers are delicious. it just reaffirms my opinion the typical Trumper just isnt that well educated....certainly not well traveled.

It should be so simple for a Trumper to point out the ISIS held territory in Tajikistan.....but they cant. Because ISIS has been defeated. lol