2011 Oslo/Utoeya Norway attacks

Overgeneraliztion, yes.

Just seemed like a cheap shot "lol @ dumb cowboy Americans" type of joke.

wasn't a "cheap shot" or a joke, or anything about americans being "dumb". it's more about a mentality that i think exists here and results in the fact that if an american leader were to express some of the ideas that were in Stotenberg's speech, or if they delivered it with similar emotion, i feel like they would end up being called a pussy or something along those lines

but mainly expressing my frustration that some other countries have adults for leaders whereas judging by the debt ceiling fiasco and a whole bunch of other crap we seem to mostly have infants holding things down

really agree with, of all people, boris johnson on this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/8658872/Anders-Breivik-There-is-nothing-to-study-in-the-mind-of-Norways-mass-killer.html

Michael Ryan had no ideology in Hungerford; Thomas Hamilton had no ideology in Dunblane. To try to advance any other explanation for their actions – to try to advance complicated "social" factors, or to examine the impact of multiculturalism in Scandinavia – is simply to play their self-important game. Anders Breivik may have constructed a portentous 1,500 page manifesto, but like so many others of his type he was essentially a narcissist and egomaniac who could not cope with being snubbed. We should spend less time thinking about him, and much more on the victims and their families.

"The Norwegian anti-Islamic citizen journalist website Document.no, to which Mr Breivik himself was a frequent contributor, has said large parts of his "compendium" are copied directly from US "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. Six of the references to the British National Party are from a Melanie Phillips article in Britain's Daily Mail about Labour, immigration and the BNP, which he appears to have cut and pasted into the document."

So now we know who reads Melanie Phillips' columns

He's being brought into court to the judge right now. The correspondent of Dutch radio is bemused: she and her colleagues can just walk in and out the building freely. No checking of bags or ID, nothing, no extra security measures or policemen separating the suspect from other people...

This OP/ED re: Oslo in The Jerusalem Post is mind-boggling. Just awful.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=230788

^^ Shameless and awful op/ed. Jeez.

Perhaps Brievik’s inexcusable act of vicious terror should serve not only as a warning that there may be more elements on the extreme Right willing to use violence to further their goals, but also as an opportunity to seriously reevaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere.

confusing 'let's learn from this' with 'let's listen to what this guy is saying'

Death toll revised to 8 (Oslo bombing), 68 (Utoeya shootings).

how did so few people die in the bombings? i mean, the devastation looked major but 8 people? i can't really get my head around it, esp in a city at what, 1600 on Friday afternoon?

Apparently, hard working Northern Europeans that they are, Norwegians are wont to go home early of a Friday... so much for the Protestant work ethic!

iirc it was a national holiday

disgrace, i was in work till 7 on friday. how i suffered.

Obviously if it had been in Britain, where we idiots are worked till we drop, there would have been carnage

was the bomb solely to distract before the shootings then? given his talk of wanting such a high death toll would seem a stroke of luck he chose or had to choose to set the bomb off at a time when nobody was around.

I'm sure I heard that the bombing was a diversionary tactic and the Youth Camp was his main target

the shooting was timed to happen on the day of the former prime minister's visit (then he was 'delayed' and missed her, apparently)

Wasn't his 'aliby' to dress up as a cop and come to the island because he wanted to speak to the youths about the bombing?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14275981

"It's one of the scariest documents I've ever read," Dr Stephen said.

"It's written by a man who's absolutely meticulous in his development of his philosophy and he's researched everything, obviously shut away for a long period of time reading, researching, digging into the internet, reading books and formulated this absolute policy of hatred of anything that is Nordic in a sense and looking at planning how to take over the world totally converted in a sort of very rather insane over-complicated deluded manner."

WTF. Really articulate expert there, well done all. Talk about people in glasshouses, nice ironic vibe from the doc's own words appearing like the rantings of a mad man.

Dr Nult more like...

I wonder if this guy was a country music fan lol

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201107250006

OF COURSE

'geert wilders is the politican out of denmark'

Kind of imagine the first draft of Glenn Beck's books land on the editor's desk as a 1500 page manuscript with large sections plagiarised from the Unabomber.

I wonder if this guy was a country music fan lol

Classical music and vocal trance iirc?

150,000 people quietly gathered today in central Oslo in memory of the victims and as a show of solidarity against terror. Many more thousands around the rest of the country.

http://static.vg.no/uploaded/image/bilderigg/2011/07/25/1311613249899_255.jpg

I have just spent 30 minutes shaking my head; it's like the only response I can muster to the Beck nonsense

Islamophobia and mass murder

Good ol' Steyn. Lots of misdirection going around from a bunch of people these past couple of days. Idly wondering what would happen if Brevnik or whoever called 'em in as a character witness.

Classical music and vocal trance iirc?

'twas a little joke, in reference to the classic geirbomb on this thread:
Why does Europeans never want to listen to country music?

I'm surprised though that the most zealous comments come from those on the right calling him on his BS.

got to unexpectedly second that boris johnson article.

one of the first mainstream pieces i've seen to address the inherent masculinity of the thing.

But, in the merest evolution of post-9/11 syndrome, Muslims are now the preferred victims perpetrators even in a story in which they are entirely absent.

FIXED THAT FOR YOU AND YOUR ASSHOLE BUDDIES AT THE NR, STEYN.

On the fence about Johnson's article. on one hand, i think he's right that a massive percentage of terrorists of all stripes are driven at some fundamental level by personal inadequacies but this seems like a huge sentence to bury in the middle and not explore in more detail:

It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause, that potentiates the poison in their bloodstream, that gives them an excuse to dramatise the resentment that they feel in the most powerful way – and to kill.

If the ideology is also a driving force - providing a framework for damaged people to legitimise grotesque violence - then the ideology is pretty damn important. The comparisons to Dunblane seem a little cheap.

isn't johnson's point that it can be any ideology? inc non-political?

Is it true, though?

Are ideologies that tell people that a catastrophe or huge injustice is going to happen to the people they identify with, and that their political rulers are actively colluding to bring it about, with radical action the only corrective, not inherently more dangerous than most others? I don't think that we can totally separate the rhetoric surrounding the idea that there's a huge conspiracy at the heart of the US government to enslave Muslim lands from 'radical Islamic terrorism' and i don't think we can separate rhetoric Beck and Wilders push, talking about Europe becoming a Caliphate, from the actions of Breivik. It might be that, at some level, people are looking for an excuse but that doesn't change the fact that there are people out there selling them ready-made ones.

plenty of blame to go around

Conspiracy theorists workin' overtime:

http://www.infowars.com/alex-jones-webster-tarpley-norway-terror-attacks-a-false-flag-staged-event/

iirc it was a national holiday

Just to clarify this: it was not a public holiday. However, it was in the period referred to as "fellesferien" ("the common holiday/vacation"), when large parts of the workforce take three weeks off during summer. Also, it is quite usual in the public sector (I'm not familiar with the central government per se) to work shorter days in summer, e.g. a schedule of half-hour shorter workdays than the nominal day in four months of the year and 15 minutes longer workdays than the nominal days in the eight remaining months.

http://static.vg.no/uploaded/image/bilderigg/2011/07/25/1311613249899_255.jpg

Quite a powerful manifestation of love, peace and democracy today at least.

http://static.vg.no/uploaded/image/bilderigg/2011/07/25/1311613249899_255.jpg

Oops already posted...

varg vikernes chimes in http://www.burzum.org/eng/library/war_in_europe01.shtml

spoiler: he shouldn't have

ew.

anti-semitic dipshit

Yikes

Having difficulty balancing the sense that it's important to know how the attacks are being seen by hard-right figures, CIF / Telegraph commenters, etc, with not wanting to actually read it.

I think Boris is trying to excuse his mates in the right-wing press for their inflammatory rhetoric, and I don't think "dude couldn't get girls so he went on a shooting spree" is a particularly great or accurate insight, nor is the 'inherent masculinity' of terrorism ("terrorists are always male, except when they aren't").

Got a bit irritated with seemingly everyone RTing that article yesterday like it was some sort of piercing insight.

Pretending that far-right maniacs aren't driven by ideology seems to be wilful disbelief, and a desperate hope that someone couldn't carry out a massacre like this out of pure cold blood, as opposed to mental illness.

yeah, to be honest boris has probably wrote that because there is a pretty thin gap between this dude's politics and the stuff you get in the tabloids/things a lot of people in his party believe.