bomb alerts and stuff

http://images.thesun.co.uk/picture/0,,2005331384,00.jpg

'Man Shot for Maliciously being a bit Asian looking in a public place'

A man killed by police in south London was unconnected to Thursday's attacks and is thought to be Brazilian.

'Man Shot for Maliciously being tanned in a public place'

http://www.express.co.uk/pixfeed/express.gif

Funny you should say that.

My uncle who is a retired immigration officer(passport control etc) who said immediately that the guy was a somali when his pic was shown on the news.

I don't think it's a race thing. The guy was no darker skinned than you or I, Ed. The police had been following him since he left a house they had under surveillance.

The Metropolitan police named him as Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, an electrician from Minas Gerais who was living in Scotia Road, Stockwell, with three cousins. He is an innocent victim of a new "shoot to kill" policy under which officers have been told to shoot at the head if they believe they are confronting a suicide bomber.

Because the "ideology of terror" isn't just about caliphate fever dreams and young true believers. All political, religious and military movements feed off of young true believers, they're a dime a dozen. The question is always, what set of circumstances and resources have arisen in a given situation to convert the potential true believers into a kinetic menace? And that's the question we keep floundering at, partly because every time you try to get at it some flag-waving jackass jumps in front of you and starts gibbering about how "They want to kill us!" The bombing in Egypt kind of puts the whole thing in stark relief -- the Islamic Brotherhood and its sympathizers are in a mutually beneficial antagonistic relationship with the authoritarian govt., the threat of each serving to fuel the excesses of the other. Which is how it always goes in these situations, but the "Arab world" is rats-overrun with it, this decades-old fight between Islamists and authoritarian secular nationalists, and our best hope is to start to try to pull apart that mutual chokehold to give those societies a little room to breathe. The Bush administration has started to get its rhetoric in order along those lines, but its actions are lagging way behind and often directly contradicting its words.

I remember 20 years ago or so hearing about how "The Muppet Show" was banned in Saudi Arabia because Miss Piggy was too risque. The Western media had a good little time giggling at that, those silly Arabs. We maybe should have been paying more attention.

-- Forest Pines (forestpine...), July 23rd, 2005 4:38 PM. (ForestPines) (late)

there are so many reasons though, maybe he had drugs on him? or didn't have a ticket? or whatever, he could have had some minor guilt inside him and started running, without thinking he'd get fucking shot to death being a likely result.

the fact that the police are acting in panic mode scares me more than the bombs. if they're not careful they'd end up raging the terror on behalf of the actual terrorists. (e.g. you could argue they've already raised the death toll by one without any bombers/whatever doing anything)

so, erm, is the "demand" still "growing"?

The police were in plain clothes so he may have thought he was running from gun toting thugs.

'...'

really, what should the tv company have done here? make miss piggy cover up?

haha momus, yes, british people are psychos!!

(i know it's tempting to interpret EVERYTHING he says in the light of the above, NRQ, given the history of his provocations here and elsewhere, but to be fair his private eye-isms above only have the implication you find in them if the mometown rat himself also believes that the express speaks for all britons, which i bet he doesn't)

( i barely remember three days ago: it is a symptom of life on-line i think)

(i don't think momus would dissent from that analysis. yesterday's espress said, there is a 'general demand' for bombers to be shot, and momus was extrapolating from that, is my reading -- of course, i'm in a total state of balmy non-paranoia this weekend so everything i write is intrinsically rational)

People seriously do start sprinting out when the guy on the platform tells you to leave. I was all like "There's fuck all going on down here, if I run out I'm more likely to be running into trouble than away from it."

Nooooo....I don't think the tv company should have done anything. I think maybe our liberal democratic societies might have been a little more circumspect about pumping money and guns into a region dominated by governments that found Miss Piggy too much to take. I think there were some blithe assumptions made that these places would all sort somehow "modernize" at some point, without any real thought about how that might happen.

i don't think anyone's doing that. it's just about the enormous gulf between two societies; something the west has never really taken very seriously at all. it's a kind of passive imperialism, isn't it? "oh, look at these backwards arabs. never mind, one day they'll be like us and they'll be able to laugh at miss piggy too."

you can see it in bush and blair's faces: they genuinely cannot comprehend that other cultures might not see western capitalism as the pinnacle of all achievement. and that lies somewhere near the root of all our problems right now.

I'm not sure actual terrorism has much to do with either of these on their own - it's only the infiltration and interference of these on what is perceived as THEIR turf and subsequent effects that seems to have prompted this sort of extreme reaction. It's possible there would be sustained co-existence if 'The West' didn't 'meddle' in what is perceived as 'their business' i.e. looking the other way while atrocities continue and the Western definition of freedom is suppressed elsewhere. I firmly doubt the recent attacks would've been an inevitability whether 'the West' had done what it had over the years or hadn't - it's merely speculation either way though, but it annoys me when the war advocates criticise this view, as if their speculation could be any 'truer'.

Not that I necessarily think looking the other way was the 'right' thing to do, though I see no evidence that the choice of action taken has been, is or will ever be truly better, and certainly not when the fatalities are so much closer to home (geography matters I'm afraid).