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About LinkBacksJust found out the partner of an old class mate was killed in the blast
Just found out the partner of an old class mate was killed in the blast
So sorry to hear that - I found out the daughter of a friend of mine was there, but is unharmed.Originally Posted by cptwhite_uk
Just found out the partner of an old class mate was killed in the blast
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The way I understood it.
ISIS/Daesh recruit people who have that trait to influence other people, they target the vulnerable people. The ones that perhaps have depression? Or feel society is against them etc? They can be influenced in many ways, and how it is executed, is endless.
So.. these cretins that end up radicalised are basically following a twisted version of the Quran. (My ex-partner is a muslim and her family introduced me to Islam but I rejected it as I'm not religious.)
I believe over time, ISIS/Daesh have these sleeper cells and they may have a calling of some sort where (Social Media/IM Apps or News) they are made to carry out an attack "as its the will of Allah"?
And from what I've heard, certain people are contacted, who have contact to these particular cells and they influence/force the individuals to do XYZ. (incase one individual is took in for questioning, he cannot give up the whole network as he only knows, say 0.2% of the Cell Network.
These lone wolfs are tied to Daesh/ISIS, they aren't doing it for themselves. They are doing it as Allah intended, as thats what the extremists are telling them.
Basically these extremists wants society to turn against Muslims and push them towards people who would welcome them with open arms. Last I heard Muslims make up 20% of the worlds population? Could be greater now?
I usually do not agree with Katie Hopkins views but she nailed this on the head. (Ignore DM) - Link
Well, while I think the time for an analysis of security failings is not yet, I wonder if that would have prevented it, or just moved the timing up a bit, to a queue at the security perimeter?
If a (presumed) suicide bomber carrying/wearing a bomb gets close to pretty much any concentrated group of people there's very little to be done to prevent them detonating. And if secutity services had known he was a bomber, presumably he'd have got nowhere near the event.
After all, we have experience of what happens if police go in hard against a suspected bomber, with Jean Charles de Menezes, and how that worked out. The only other way to deal with suicide bombers is the sort of hard defence Israeli troops use, with suspects stopped at gunpoint, out in a clear area. Quite how that could be done with thousands of fans at any large pop, sporting (etc) event, I don't know, short of turning the UK into a militarised state.
That, IMHO, is why the terror alert level has been raised. This marks a somewhat new tactic, and is going to be VERY hard to defend against. Consider the quantity of soft targets, including every premiere league football match, or even a few hundred people in a small-town cinema.
Give a suicide bomber a bomb and they're extremely hard to stop, unless they can be stopped before they commence the attack.
I still think the biggest single step we could take against this is to limit the media frenzy that descends after an event, and limit coverage to brief, non-sensationalised factual reporting of what's known, not have every talking head drone on repeatedly for hours with non-stop speculation. Come on BBC, and others, get your heads out of your .... exhaust pipes, and realise your coverage is doing the terrorists job for them, for pities sake.
QFT. Without meaning to trivialise the issue with a frivolous comparison the way pitch invaders are dealt with at sporting events is a reasonable example I think. Instead of giving them their 30 seconds of fame the cameras are now switched elsewhere and you get a short apology for the delay along with a brief explanation of 'there's an idiot on the pitch'. No name, no face, no glory. Is it too much to hope that we could have a similar tactic employed for mass murdering lunatics? A factual piece that omits the perpetrators name (if known) and provides a little advice on personal security if the authorities deem there to be an ongoing threat.
There is, of course, an issue with freedom of the press, and I'm not convinced that government regulating compliance with this sort of self-restraint by the press is a good idea, but a co-ordinated self restraint by the various major organs of press and media certainly is.
Erm ... not convinced she nailed anything there. And she's 100% wrong that the people behind these attacks (if there is an organised unit behind them) doesn't care if we're divided or not. They absolutely do, because a divided nation - one that vilifies people because of their religion, or race, or nationality - is a much better source of disaffected people to radicalise than one that is united in its acceptance and support of everyone.
She might be right that they want to kill everyone. And if they do, a) they're going to fail, miserably, because there will always be more people, and b) there's no way to fight that kind of extremism anyway - there'll always be nutters who think some greater power wants them to do barbaric nonsense. Taking out any perceived "leaders" will just further radicalise those who already revere them.
Against the kind of threat that she is suggesting we face - a group of people who think that we're all infidels, that all infidels should die, and that they have a religious duty to carry that out - there is no "final solution" (as she so eloquently suggested we should find). There is only mitigation.
bottles are banned because they are easily thrown around and can hurt people, or the "water" is vodka or another alcoholic drink and someone get's wasted inside and causes trouble for themselves or others
for similar reasons that's why you get drinks in plastic glasses as they can't be as easily thrown or hit someone hard
And you say it is business as usual? The dead never get to carry on as normal.
This is not usual, Andy. This is not 'part and parcel' of city life, Sadiq. - LINK TO THAT ARTICLE
Accept its part and parcel of London?
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This country is not usual. It is absurd. Disgusting. Forlorn. Broken.
'We stand united. We are not broken. We are strong.'
'We stand united. We are not broken. We are strong.'
Repeated like a mantra.
The new Lord's Prayer of a terrorised generation.
Saying it over and over, faster and faster as the sharks circle and it becomes clear that hope is fading fast. That this could be the end. If not this time, then the next one. Or the one after that.
Is pretty much what is said by the government after each attack...
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Do not use these acts of kindness to support your false narrative that this is us standing up to terror.
The people helping are reacting instinctively. Battling against blood and death.
They are not standing up to terror. They are not showing we are strong. They are trying to scoop up the handfuls of flesh that is weak and stop it bleeding.
They are being decent humans. They should be applauded. Rewarded. Not manipulated by impotent politicians into standing as a perverse symbol of how terror will never beat us.
I 100% agree with her here.
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In truth, the terrorists couldn't give a stuff what I tweet or write or say. They couldn't care less if we stand divided or pretend to be united.
Genuinely believe they don't... because they will continue to attack and they will keep up with these barbaric acts regardless if we are united or not. These attacks won't be stopping anytime soon.
Assuming this is ISIS, or a sympathiser thereof, that group's goals and aims aren't secret. They're well published, in fact, in the group's glossy magazines.
Their long-term goal is an apocalyptic war between The West and Islam.
To achieve their long-term goal, their middle-term goal is for all Western countries to cast out all Muslims, such that they return to the Middle East & North Africa, and sign up with ISIS.
To achieve their medium-term goal, their short-term goal is to make Westerners hate moderate Muslims, in an effort to eliminate moderacy entirely (i.e. make all muslims, regardless of innocence, into pariahs).
Their public goal is eliminating the "grayzone" of peaceful coexistence between Muslims and traditionally Christian countries.
Like it or not "scooping up handfuls of flesh" as a multicultural community is defying them.
You're right that attacks won't stop. But you're wrong that not giving in to their goals isn't defying them, and you're wrong that they don't give a stuff about whether you're divided or united. It's the only thing they care about. Terrorism isn't about killing people, it's about enacting political change on a grand scale - killing just happens to be an efficient means to do it.
scaryjim (24-05-2017)
Hmmmm, where to start ...
"They are not standing up to terror."
The people directly affected by the attack, no. They're trying to put their lives back together and make sense of what's happened - something they may never be able to do. But for everyone else? If you're accepting that these attacks are orchestrated, then they have only one aim - to provoke a reaction that casts the perpetrators as victims. That's what IS really want. They want an excuse to do far worse. They want something to retaliate to. They want the "West" to declare war on Islam. Trump's already pretty damn close. People denying them that narrative - people coming together in the wake of these attacks - people refusing to give in to hatred and rejecting that this is a "Muslim" issue - that is standing up. That is being strong. The fact that Katie Hopkins can't recognise strength when she sees it doesn't surprise me.
"they will continue to attack and they will keep up with these barbaric acts regardless if we are united or not. These attacks won't be stopping anytime soon."
No, they probably won't . That's because these are not well-resourced organised attacks. They're individuals doing damn stupid things that they happen to think are right. No matter how much IS claim responsibility, and no matter how much influence they have on the people carrying out the attacks, the simple fact is that these are small scale, individual actions. Almost impossible to detect and stop in advance.
So what can we do? How about persuading more of the individuals that what they're doing isn't right? Which leads me back to narrative. Hopkins' narrative is that we need to do something about Muslims. And she's probably right. Sadly, what she wants to do is brand them all terrorists at birth, get them out of "our" country and back to where they came from, and never let them back in. But it's OK - I'm sure that kind of narrative isn't going to affect anyone in the slightest. I'm sure it's not going to persuade the white English knuckleheads who're itching for a barney to punch the first "Muslim" person they see. I'm sure it's not going to convince downtrodden, young Muslims that actually maybe IS are right, and the West does hate Islam, and maybe they should do something about it. A narrative of hate makes it much easier to radicalise young people (who almost certainly already feel downtrodden in our society), providing more bomb-fodder for the agitators.
Saracen's already mentioned it in terms of national media reporting of these events, but it applies to all media, and particularly to those with a large reach. The narrative is crucial. In fact, the narrative is the only thing that matters.
Do you think the deaths of 22 civilians really help IS in any way? What was the point of killing them?
It was to produce a narrative, and it's one that Katie Hopkins wilfully feeds every day of her life. She's horribly wrong, and she can't be anything else because she's made one critical mistake - she thinks the attack was about taking lives.
You're right that these attacks aren't going to stop. That's because these are the types of attacks that we can't really stop. They're happening more because we can and do stop other types of attacks. Yes, for the individuals involved they are horrific, and life changing, and they can't go on, business as usual. But for the rest of us, the strong thing to do is to resist the narrative of hate - to come together and support each other, particular across racial and religious boundaries. Giving in to the hate and terror is weak. And as Mancunian, I'm not about to do that.
@macman:
but the issue is what does she or you therefore want to happen instead? What does she think is the alternative? Round up all the muslims? Close down all the mosques and deport anyone who has read the Koran? That would be just what the nutters want. To be able to demonise the west as anti muslim - and bang on about how it is every muslim's duty to fight the oppressor. And at the same time such action would be as discriminatory, unfair and persecuting as the actions she is currently condemning. In trying to "defend ourselves against evil" she would see us adopt the practices and espouse the very evil she (rightly) says is abhorrent and sickening. The ultimate irony that in trying to deal with an evil in a quick fix blanket way we would become a worse evil. And she would have no problem with that because it does not affect her? It's amazing how readily people will tolerate evil when it doesn't affect them, but cry injustice when their comfort is threatened.
So the counter argument comes that in dealing with a pernicious cancer one must accept the period of sickening the whole body for the greater good. But can it be? How far does one go to deal with hidden evils that are hard to locate? "We know they're out there but where?" Where to target? Well you target the affected organ, and seek to contain the tumour and prevent spread. But you do not simply chop open the body and rip out the entire gastro enteric system because at some point some of its cells are statistically likely to become malignant. Can it ever be right to condemn a whole swathe of people on the off-chance because some of them will be bad? We must be most careful, and protect the innocent - of all faiths and backgrounds. If we want law and freedom, then we have to avoid the kneejerk into the totalitarian solution. We cannot and must not demonise a whole populace out of fear of an unknown few, just because that persecution should not affect ourselves (directly).
And equally the communities from whence these parasites come cannot cry foul because we rightly target them for scrutiny in trying to find these individuals. The argument of those communities is that these people do not represent those communities. Quite, and so together the services and those communities must both do their parts to weed out these susceptible folk before they are hardened, to report the unusual and radicalised. Those communities must not tolerate the extreme hateful preachers who speak of such harm as their god's will - and should be more willing to see those venues where this is taught shut down. But this is difficult and it is not as clear-cut as some people would have us believe.
This. In work yesterday, some of my colleagues had a British station on the radio playing (dunno which one), and it was as if the whole station had been dedicated to it. And what was irritating me was not so much the factual reports, but rather the amount of surmising that was going on in those reports. I get that it was an appalling act, and that it is the very epitome of something 'newsworthy', but why do we allow such irresponsibility and irrationality to follow in the aftermath of terrorists attacks? It is exactly the response, and attention, that a terrorist organisation with no clearly defined goals, or ones that are deliverable at least, would want.
That said, whose to blame? The stations pumping out speculation masquerading as news reports, or Joe Public who appears to want it?
The Jean Charles de Menezes is a great example of police incompetence and should not be used as an excuse of what happens if the police go hard after terrorists.
Here in London, people are stopped at random and searched. Even I was stopped and search by the police eight years. It is not unusual to see security men with metal detectors when visiting clubs. You see police officers with machine guns on the streets. Sometimes taking basic security measures can thwart an attack.
[Just seen the news headlines where the military are now involved so now we are a militarised state.]
This kind of incident has more similarities to a mass shooting than a 'real' terrorist attack.
We should treat it in much the same way. Talk about the victims and avoid talking about the worthless loser that did it. It really doesn't matter what motivated he or she.
Memetic toxoplasmosis.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17...lasma-of-rage/What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?
Consider the war on terror. It’s a truism that each time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Taken as a meme, it is a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and several bajillion of their tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.
Anger doesn't solve this. Katie hopkins' final solution is the same as da'esh's final solution, and they both end pretty similarly to that other final solution everyone's heard about.
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