Manchester blast
 

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-40007886.

I'm from there. It shouldn't make a difference. I doubt anyone I know was there, but.....

Most of the concertgoers were kids. Fucking awful.

Each attendee should get a full refund of their ticket price AND a free ticket* to another concert of their choosing**. That way those who were kiled will not have died for nothing.

* Good only at the same location.
** Just in case the suicide bomber was a disgruntled Ariana Grande fan.

How something like this could happen in a country that has a moat around it I can't imagine. OTOH, a moat is not a wall.

Too soon?

Yes too soon

It does hit harder at home, sorry.

Most, all? recent terror attacks are perpetrated by citizens/ resisdents.

ISIS radicalizes people at home via youtube etc, they are not agents sent in from outside any more, that's out dated rhetoric.

He was referring to how Trump's wall would prevent that from happening here, which is of course as ridiculous a premise as the channel would prevent it there. ;)

Britian was once protected by a moat. So terrorists built a Chunnel - defeating that protection.

I was referring to the Great Wall of China.

Well excuuuuuuse me. :p:

So it's largely domestic terrorism. Those citizens/residents must be very unhappy with their home. You'd think BREXIT would have cheered them up by now. I guess you just can't please some people. All in all a small price to pay for personal freedom though. You don't want Britain to become like China.

Hark! An EU terrorist attacking the heartland of Brexit. It makes complete sense. Why did political spin doctors not know it first?

I went to work today and a lass from my team was desperately trying to get word of her friend who took his kid sister to the concert. He wasn't answering his phone, he wasn't responding to texts.
She eventually heard from him about 2pm - his phone had powered down. He and his sister had stayed in Manchester overnight as they couldn't get a train back to Yorkshire.


Something I find very, very sad in all this, is that the bomber was only 22. He was barely a grown up himself. I'm sure he felt very grown up. A year younger than my eldest niece.

He took a couple of steps from the nest and ...

Angry and violent young men (mainly) who for whatever reason feel the world is against them, or that their parents don't understand them, or that life needs some greater meaning than it has, have always been vulnerable to extremist recruitment and/or influence. They're also vulnerable to a bunch of other stuff, like depression and suicide.

IS and their ilk are insidious. The mechanisms they employ in recruitment, whether to formal engagement or informal association, are highly sophisticated and very effectively calibrated for their target groups.

They only need to reach a handful of kids to cause unbelievable harm - both in terms of casualties and in terms of social cohesion.

And we play their game - every time we tweet or post a facebook comment that points the finger at muslims in general, we read the script they penned for us. We feed straight back into that recruitment machine.

In case you hadn't guessed from the above: I made the mistake of reading some youtube comments underneath a clip of James Corden's piece about the bombing. Just made me feel even angrier. Do they think they have more right to their outrage than Mancunian muslims? Are they more personally affected by this horror than the mostly muslim taxi drivers who ferried people about Manchester all night, for free, getting kids back to worried parents? How about the muslim concert goers?

Fucking hell, man. What a mess. 22 dead, 59 injured, and how many traumatised for life? How do you explain something like this to those kids?

You just have to explain to them how much more their concert tickets would cost to pay for proper security screening and how much longer they would have to stand in line for everyone to get screened. I'm sure they'd agree that taking their chances on what happened was the better option.

While you're at it, tell them how lucky they were that NHS support wasn't taken down by hackers at the same time; because, NHS is still running Windows XP with all its vulnerabilities. Point out how much they're saving on taxes by not upgrading.

You just have to say what the young people are wanting to hear, that you're saving them money; then, they'll calm down and everything will be hunky-dory.

Christian/atheist/FSM youth who feel alienated commit suicide. Muslim youth become suicide bombers, either to kill some of the white devils that caused their problems, or in hope of the virgins and respect from the Muslim community.

Or shoot up a school, or join a far right group, or take out their frustrations on young women.

If a far right group espoused suicide bombing some of them would do that. In the 70s it probably would have been left wing terrorists.

The ideology of militant islamists is profoundly dangerous because of the level of destruction their followers and supporters aim for - but the mechanisms at play are the same as they ever were.

Facebook has become a nice recruiting tool for nutters. It all goes back to the failure of our education system. The localized extremists who should have slowly been extinguished by reality now have a larger platform for hate. I'm expecting much more trouble with homegrown nuts as they expand their meat world bubbles into digital. I guess the Feds can monitor them more easily this way.

I think you've nailed the reason why this kind of extremism is so persistent. When you look at the various revolutionary, and pseudo revolutionary movements in modern history, they mostly fizzle out or crash and burn, with just a handful rumbling along at a very local level. Look at the left wing revolution-inspired terrorism of the 70s.

Revolutionary movements have generally had at their core the seeds of their on destruction - either they succeed and become the establishment against which others revolt, or the new tomorrow fails to materialise and the troops get bored, grow up, lose faith and move on.

The IS model is kind of ingenious. They've successfully utilised modern technology to make their impact global, and have agents in every country and to maintain a startling air of immediacy and relevance.

Compare their reach and impact to the communist extremists who also had a global agenda and the difference is frightening.

I have right wing Christians in my bacefook feed. I'm often left wondering, do they know what they're saying? Is this a fantasy or an alternate reality they're describing? The words are the same as you get from crackpot Islamists but how many would take it to the next level?

Most of their frustrations are caused by young women, or the lack thereof, if they were getting laid they wouldn't have time to kill people.
In this case "fuck 'em" is not a dismissal, but the solution.
C'mon girls, for your community, for your country. :haha:

Ha!

Every time that happens here we are told it is a simple and obvious gun control issue.

Or bullying.
Or mental health infrastructure.
Or many other root cause discussions.

It think you'd be hard pressed to find a school shooting where coverage didn't include more than gun control.

Gun control is about harm reduction; it's a different topic from root causes. Both harm reduction and root causes should be addressed. You're never going to do well enough on root causes to prevent all incidents, and you're never going to reduce the damage from any incidents to the point where root causes are moot.

And here we have the real problem: left-wing elites bullying well-intentioned patriots with troublesome nuance.

JUST LET ME BE MAD AT A SIMPLE PROBLEM SO I CAN YELL IT AWAY.

You're both making good points, but only one of you is talking about stuff that can improve the situation.

That's one way to look at it, but have you considered that if Liberals would just SHUT UP, all the problems would just go away by themselves? You know, like problems do.

Could it be that suicide bombers expecting to get 72 virgins in heaven are now selecting venues where they can choose some virgins to take along with them?

Oh I forgot you were here! See you in July, everyone.

Have any of you ever considered that if you quit separating yourselves according to left, right, liberal, conservative and focus on fixing the goddamn problems you're bitching about, instead of looking for whom to blame it on, or who the reason is we can't fix it, or who caused it and why, or why we should fix it this way and not your stupid, retarded way, that something might actually get done?

This why I refrain from politics, and it's why I hate people.

Yeah. I have. I try to be mindful of the more important ideas and not just the shiny / loud / popular ideas. I have some success. I definitely have room for improvement.

It's also often the case that the right thing to do / right way to view an issue is also satisfying. Sometimes it's right to call out the other side and challenge them on the facts.

I don't hate or love politics. I accept the fact that political considerations are often unavoidable. Sometimes they're present but merely in the way. Sometimes they're part of the problem, maybe a big part.

Yes but I gave up when I realised you'll thwart me at every turn. If I get an idea and want to discuss it, you run off to bucket night, or the river. :mecry:

He's fickle that way.

so to get back on track.....

This

She's 91, you know

and this

they say it all

We've just had a vicious attack on some of the most vulnerable of our population too. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured.

fixing the problem
 

You live in a neighborhood where the feral dog population is growing...a number of folks have been injuried -- some killed -- by these dogs...after each attack, vocal folks in the neighborhood make a big show about how 'we can't let these dogs change the way we conduct our lives!' and how 'we must be united!', but not one person lifts a finger to ring the animal control folks, or to just pick up and carry a baseball bat when goin' out.

Animal control, of course, has a pretty good bead on the dogs but is largely hobbled in its efforts to exterminate them by animal rights bastids who make a big stink anytime anyone even thinks about killing the animals...'you're a speciesist!' they shriek.

So, the ferals keep eatin' babies and old folks, folks keep jibber-jabberin', nuthin' really gets done.

The Hebrews had/have a solution for this crap: 'If you know someone is coming to kill you, get up early and go kill them first'.

Seems to me: we're well past the crack of dawn on this, their intent is crystal, 'diplomacy' (bribery) has been tried (and has failed)...time to kill some people.

Did Fox News also say that!? Wow. They need Ailes back to restore 'fair and honest'.

Except that they did.

Several members of the community, including members of the bomber's own family reported him to the anti-radicalisation unit as a potential danger.

He was investigated and deemed to be only peripherally involved in radicalism and not an imminent danger.

Off you go, see how that works for you.

Or were you expecting the Government to do that for you.

What I expect is for our employees to put law-abiding citizens first, and to eliminate threats to those citizens (the folks who pay the bills).

What I get is a lotta noise from folks who, for some godamned reason, wanna hesitate and shuffle their feet and not do much else.

As for my neighborhood: I do what I can.

What about you?

#

"He was investigated and deemed to be only peripherally involved in radicalism and not an imminent danger."

Yeah, that seems to be the story over and over. Seems like, at some point, folks would say 'okay, the last ten violent acts were done by persons only peripherally involved in radicalism and not an imminent danger, so mebbe we need to redefine our terms, lower the bar, tolerate less'.

i'm gonna regret this...
 

tw, what the holy fuck does fox news have to do with anything?

It explains your attitude. And contempt for honesty and facts.

Since you have none, it also explains your excessive use of irrelevant and profane adjectives. And your love of violence.

The Manchester bomber was a citizen and, as far as I know, a law abiding one until this incident.
The last ones that succeeded. Investigators have to do triage, and if the ones that they do consider to be a threat end up not making the news, that's probably in their favor.

Do you want to pay for an agency to put permanent surveillance on everyone who has ever shown up on their radar?

Would you want them to be able to do that, even if there were no monetary cost?

Or are you just advocating skipping the surveillance and imprisoning or killing people without evidence? Evidence against one [insert ethnicity/religion/etc] is evidence against all?

What facts have I ignored, tw?

#

HM, I don't have all the solutions. Just seems to me what our employees are doin' now isn't succeeding well enough, often enough.

We don't know if they stopped any, stopped 99 or stopped 999.

exactly right, Bruce
 

:neutral:

I wonder if one of these horrific incidents prompts more people who didn't want to get involved to come forward? Of course that can be a double edged sword. Cops may get useful pertinent information but may increase the static from paranoid people whose neighbor only hangs wash out on even numbered days.

From the Mirror

I'm glad to hear some mosques are trying to discredit isis.

As the picture demonstrates, police are now accompanied by an armed soldier ... and apparently by Superman.

I think most probably do try to discredit IS and speak against extremism. I think there are a few hotbeds of activity - Finsbury Park mosque was one the most infamous for a while, but they seem to have gone to a lot of effort to reform since Abu Hamza went.

I daresay a majority of imams would really like these fuckers to stop polluting their faith with their dangerous notions.


It doesn't take a huge number of extremists, and it doesn't take a huge number of sympathetic mosques or community leaders to cause a lot of problems, about which the peaceful majority are unable to do very much.

Back when I was a councillor, I had to engage with various community leaders,and there didn't seem to me to be a massive difference between the attitudes and concerns of local imams and the attitudes and concerns of local vicars. The guys who ran the muslim community centre youth group were just as determined as the Church of England youth club organiser was to get young lads off the street and onto the five-a-side football pitch.

There were some cultural differences, no doubt, particularly in some parts of the muslim community, where the percentage of people who were born and raised in Pakistan or Kashmir was much higher than in other parts of the community, but in general they just seemed to want the same basic shit everyone else wanted.

[Bold mine]

My impression is that it's only because the English won't let them.

A grassroots unarmed anti-terrorism movement modeled on similar anti-crime movements could significantly reduce the impact of terrorist attacks.

Unfortunately, the English mentality of a passive citizenry that leaves their personal safety to the government, in the hands of professionals, has undermined such grassroots organization; so, there's nothing left to be adapted from anti-crime to anti-terrorism let alone incentive to start from scratch. This also applies to Manchester which while it didn't deserve what happened and didn't want it to happen; nonetheless, was an enabler by just being English.

Now you know and knowing is half the battle. MI6 probably just shakes its head at MI5 and a docile citizenry that doesn't care to change it.

...

racists?

If only we could find something that linked all the health problems of the poor together.....

hypochondria?

Air, every one of those terrorists breath air. Probably drink water too, but that's not a given. I'll bet every one of the perverts showers nude. :yesnod:

Penises. Every single one of those violent fuckers has a penis.

That's what I said. :haha:

The brainwashed must do a pathetic god's bidding. Because a feeble god cannot do its own slaying. Why would anyone worship something so pathetic? Brainwashing. It works on adults who are still children.

An adult would have found a new argument by now.