Daesh – Memphis Flyer

Greg Cravens

About Toby Sells’ story “New Day at the CA (Again)” …

What concerns me is that now that Gannett will own most of the newspapers in Tennessee, it will attempt to have “one newspaper” for the state, which for Memphis will be tragic, because we aren’t like the rest of the state.

I am happy that we still have at least one locally owned media outlet.

Here is an idea for the Flyer: Purchase the rights to use the banner of the Memphis Press-Scimitar or some other historic paper (like the Memphis World or the original Memphis Press) or prepare to launch a new banner such as the Memphis Post. Leverage the foundation provided by the Flyer in concert with the talents of the soon-to-be-unemployed journalists from the CA under the new newspaper banner.

Marketing would not shy from the fact that it is essentially a reconstituted version of the CA, with a renewed focus on local news and continued provisions of national and international information. Absorb advertisers from the CA as local readership and web counts inevitably decline and eventually force the CA out of publication with the new banner assuming the role of the daily newspaper of record.

If I won one of the asininely huge Mega Millions jackpots, I would give you guys the money to do it, with the only caveat being you would hire a staff of top English majors to review each article for spelling and grammatical errors.

Barf

I have been to Des Moines twice within the past few months, most recently at the end of September. As the article indicated The Des Moines Register is now owned by Gannett, and in my opinion, the local coverage of such things, including high school football, has suffered. The main reason I take the CA is the fairly decent coverage of local events across spectrums. Once the change to Gannett is made, I think many CA subscribers will be disappointed.

MKBW

About Bianca Phillips’ post “Independent Autopsy Shows Hog-tying Killed Troy Goode” …

I don’t think facedown hog-tying is the usual means of restraint in hospitals.

CL Mullins

Surely some sedatives could have been found that would have been safer than hog-tying him.

Smitty 1961

It’s really simple. Treat intoxicated people, and people having a psychological break, differently than violent criminals. The former group doesn’t have the normal protective reflexes that the latter does, so they can die if hog-tied. This was a preventable death.

OakTree

Now that an independent autopsy has been released on the death of Troy Goode, what is being done to hold the correct parties responsible? Have the officers involved been fired? Suspended? Anything?

As friends of Troy Goode, we were angry when he was taken from this world in such an unnecessary and violent manner. However, we did not react violently. We did not call for retaliation. We protested peacefully and waited for answers. Now that those answers are here, we demand swift and fair action.

I had hoped for a proactive response from local government. I suppose a reactive one will have to do. These murderers cannot be allowed to keep their jobs. Hopefully, they will be charged with the crimes for which they are guilty.

Kyle Wojt

About Eileen Townsend’s Viewpoint, “A Zoo Solution” …

With over one million visitors annually, the Memphis Zoo is the No. 1 tourist attraction in Memphis and the sixth-largest tourist attraction in Tennessee, according to the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development.

Memphis has few assets. The Zoo is an incredibly important one. We should remember that.

datGuy

About the Flyer’s editorial, “Countering Daesh” …

Don’t want refugees entering your country? Then stop electing criminals who bomb theirs.

Mickey White

When you have declared enemies so fanatic that they will not only risk their lives to deprive you of yours but will pursue such a suicidal end as a glory to be achieved at all costs, how do you arrive at the right sort of disincentives to discourage them? That is rapidly becoming the main theological conundrum of our times, and, as such things go, it is somewhat more compelling than, say, that famous question that medieval scholastics used to ponder: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

And, unfortunately, as last Friday’s tragic events in Paris most recently demonstrated, the question of the suicide bomber (or suicide shooter or what-have-you) is inescapable. How we answer it when it comes around to the U.S. will, as they say, determine our final grade. It goes beyond politics or statecraft or even religion. It is, in the most literal sense, existential.

So what do we do? None of the instant solutions tendered so far have that Bingo ring to them. Not, for example, Donald Trump’s seat-of-the-pants recommendation that we “take the oil,” the previous raw material the minions of Daesh (the latest name for ISIS or ISIL) are selling on the black market to finance their caliphate. And how do we do that? By “bombing the s**t” out of it at its source — pipes, scaffolding, sand and all.” Oh.

Trump is nothing if not versatile, however; his ex post facto remedy for the carnage in France was that the assassins could have been stopped if only their victims had been packing their own heat. Never mind that he borrowed this from Wayne LaPierre, the sage of the NRA, and that its actual point of origin was probably a 1970s episode of All in the Family in which Archie Bunker advocated that airlines start handing out guns for self-defense to all enplaning passengers.

At the other extreme of possible action, there seems to be no practical way to bargain with the jihadists, who would appear to be insisting on absolute surrender on the part of us infidels — a category that, to judge by events, is virtually all-inclusive: Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Buddhist, secular humanist, trash-talking atheists, and even, it would seem, their moderate co-religionists in the Islamic world, who are as likely to be turned into corpses or sex slaves as anybody else, and who in several well-publicized cases have been forced to pay with their heads, despite their conversion to Islam.

But there, if anywhere, lies the clue to success — not in routine denunciations by fanatics on our side of “radical Islam” (by which, they usually mean, Islam of any persuasion) but in coming to closer terms of cooperation with the governments and societies (Jordan, Turkey, the Emirates, to name several) that practice Islam in a way congenial not only to the Koran and the prophet but to the principle of coexistence in a world of diversity.

That’s not a complete answer, we know, and we’re not talking about trying to line up such actual and potential Arab allies on the firing line as “boots on the ground.” That hasn’t worked out too well. But active cooperation of some sort beats hell out of our trying to become Holy Warriors in our own right.