Car Bomb Drama

lol at the target being a Tiger Tiger

Intelligence sources said they were keeping an open mind on who was responsible for the car bomb.

"All options, including the Irish, are open at this stage," said the source.

Strange to mention the Irish like that?

political correctness gone mad

Provided me with an excuse for being late this morning!

Curious. Friend on LJ mentioned this and implied it was aimed at Gay Pride march which is on today/tomorrow?

Strange to mention the Irish like that?

It probably went something like
Copper: We are keeping all options open
Hack: All options?
Copper: Yes
Hack: Even the Irish?
Copper: All options includes everyone so yes that would include the Irish
Hack: Got my "quote" thanks!

The Irish

How Journalism Works

sounds 'bout right

xpost

lol 'all options including militant smokers'

If this will lead to arresting Americans who claim to be Irish despite being roughly 23rd generation, then I'm all for it.

Spookily I revived that thread only last night. What with this and the Benoit wiki business it's as if the internet is trying to tell us something.

CHRIS BENOIT TRYING TO KILL ALL LONDON GAYS AS A FINAL ACT OF VENGEANCE

Showing admirable restraint, the Evening Standard's headline is "BID TO KILL 1,700 IN WEST END"

£20

Scotland Yard reporting that vehicle contained large containers of petrol, gas cylinders and nails. Spotted by a member of an ambulance crew who saw 'smoke' coming from the vehicle.

Managing director of Fopp brought in for questioning...

It's good that they set an exact target number. Must've been the Irish, gentleman terrorists, golden years

Is there an Orange mobile phone shop anywhere near there?

Isn't attaching gas cannisters a rather unconventional method of making a car bomb?

My guess - it was some idiot's attempt to pimp his ride that got out of control.

The nails were to sprinkle over the road James Bond style so fellow pimpers would blow out, right?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/77/Dickdastardly.jpg/250px-Dickdastardly.jpg

Gas canister, especially if acetylene would make a very powerful bomb and have been used extensively IEDs in Iraq. It doesn't rule out anyone though as the information is widely available on the internet. Whether it is Islamic, British or Irish far right fuckwits I am very very angry right now.

tony blair fans?

angry charlton fans?

Bombing for poppage?

strike that, bemused spurs fans actually.

Bit of a waste of a Merc if you ask me

I guess someone just wanted to give Gordon a nice initiation present.

mi5/mossad/cia amirite

it's what they're still saying about 7/7...

xpost
No, probably not.

Finding who was responsible will be like looking for a nail in a haymarket.

ho, there it is.

I've decided that if I ever get a dog I'll call it Mossad

... of course, it'll get blamed for every bit of trouble in the neighbourhood

Have the organisers of rival club night Club Poptimism been brought in for questioning yet?

Had it gone off, would anyone have dared do a "Tiger Tiger burning bright" headline?

So that's another one found. 2 seems like an odd number, so presumably there are more. There doesn't seem much concern about it here, though. What's it like in London?

seems like an odd number

well, even, to be fair.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6255452.stm

I like that the second car was found in a council pound. That's one hard-ass car-lifter driver be shitting himself, then.

some guy on the news pointed out this merc outside tiger tiger was almost certainly also parked illegally -- esp if it was in fact right outside the club.

This shit's going on in the american news, too.

I like that, as with the shoebomber onwards, any act of half-assed idiocy that can be construed as terrorism will be done so over and over again by both the U.S. Admin and 24/7 media.

eh?

errrrr

UH

One might take away the observation that if this, too, turns out to be the work of bin Ladin-sympathizing locals, they're fortunately not a very crack bunch. Considering Dhiren Barot -- who was primarily an Internet surfer and collector of cracked plans -- and the Chapati flour/peroxide bomb gang, success in bombing seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

yeah there is that. i dunno what it's like in london (cos i'm not there) but i remember two years ago most of my peoples were kind of blase about it, partly because that's what londoners do. but also i worked around bloomsbury and it just felt closer. it is funny being in the provinces (lol i mean i'm 45 mins out of london, i may as well be in the outer suburbs) cos when anyone visits london they notice the increased policing way more than people living there.

Guardian reporting second car is a def bomb.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2114743,00.html

A large part of Islam is about collective feeling and collective responsibility, something that has been scoured out of western society by the victory of liberalism.

somewhat pointless abstraction. i'm not saying it's totally untrue (though it's probably *as* true of christianity), but what part of islam, what collective responsibility or feeling was involved here, or on 7/7?

Just because it is allegedly doctors behind these bomb plots it doesn't mean that they were acting out of thatcherite/blairite self interest. We should start repairing the damage done to our fellow humans and the easiest place to start is at home. A socialist solution is about the only one that flies.

-- Ed, Tuesday, July 3, 2007 10:07 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Link

you need to open the shutters a little if you can only conceive of things within the parochial confines of modern british politics. who said terrorists acted out of self-interest? only a tiny, mental subset would link self-interest in all its forms to thatcher and blair anyway, but who, seriously who, is saying they were 'were acting out of thatcherite/blairite self interest'?

ie - it is no surprise that it is the well off and the succesful, and yes, the doctors, that become the ideologues and the revolutionaries, because wealth is not a defence against anomie/disconnect

-- Filey Camp, Tuesday, July 3, 2007 2:48 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

oh what fucking balls. anomie, disconnect? fucking listen to the arcade fire. these are not revolutionaries, they are dipshits who wanted to kill at random. ideologues? yeah, regular fucking karl marxes, pretty inspiring shit. what revolution, what ideology were they going for exactly?

Oh, OK, that shop thing in Riddrie:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6266022.stm

I dont think what youve said necessarily contradicts my point. whether they are revolutionaries or not, and whether islamist fantasy counts as an ideology or not, is one thing. my point is that ridiculuous young men who dont feel they belong in society (whether is correct or not - history of adolescent men to thread) will always be drawn to things that give identity. and that this isnt to do with poverty, but with socialisation/integration/cohesion

my point is that ridiculuous young men who dont feel they belong in society (whether is correct or not - history of adolescent men to thread) will always be drawn to things that give identity. and that this isnt to do with poverty, but with socialisation/integration/cohesion

-- Filey Camp, Tuesday, July 3, 2007 10:43 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

i sort of -- sort of -- agree. but, you know, fucking listen to goth rather than started getting into millennarial religion, travelling to pakistan and learning how to make bombs and then bombing people. it's not the ridiculous young men but the more sinister old men you have to worry about.

i don't know if these were young or ridiculous men, either. and i don't know that the 7/7 guys even were particularly socially isolated.

in a way this is all another debate, which is legitimate -- but like home secretaries using terrorism as an excuse to curb liberties, i'm queasy about using this as a convenient moment to deliver the same message over again, it's a bit opportunistic.

well you're sinister old men are your ideologues..and you offer belonging, a role, a place to contribute, unity, sense of purpose, meaning...to impressionable and disconnected (yes, disconnected, i mean isnt disconnection the price to pay for decades of individualism?) young men, and they become younger 'sinister old men'

im not really saying these people are socially isolated. im saying they;re not socially integrated (at large or, it seems, within own communities). i dont think isolation and lack-of-integration are the same thing

of course you are right about the opportunism regarding using stuff like this to curb liberties (this is a widely held viewpoint as well, hearing much more talk of 'this is becoming a police state' than 'terrorist oh no' on the streets right now)

John Smeaton reminds me of Ally McCoist in terms of accent, talking style and using his head and arms expressively

basically i'm having a bit of a time where i think everyone is mad, one way or another, because we can't really handle the prospect of death, ours and others'. and i guess these guys feel it more strongly than most. that's not to say there aren't concrete things too, to 'protest'. i wonder, of the bombers so far, since 7/7, arrested or dead, migrated from regular protest to violence.

these particular people may not have been integrated so much -- locum doctors from overseas don't do that so much, if their family is back home and they're here basically to fast-track, training-wise, for when they get back. they move around, they focus on getting it done, they often work over the odds to get the good references. they don't particularly need to integrate with their communities any more than the bankers in rotterdam or the wonks in brussels. from my experience. all that will become clear.

Filey Camp otm; this has nothing to do with protest (except insofar as protest stands in for personal statement, which admittedly it often does)

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3342018&page=1

i think 'protest', not necessarily specifically about this war or that policy, but more broadly, is in the mix, is probably a conscious reason. for locum doctors it makes a lot more sense than anomie or lack of integration. locum doctors come from all over and (presumably) experience about the same level of dislocation.

why not cheer them up by renaming them lolcum doctors?

Western society/capitalism priviledges the individual above the structure/society, (the americans pay at least lip service to the notion of a structure...'america'...the british don't even do that..the dutch even less so?).

This is where the difference between isolation and non-integration comes in. isolation is an extreme case, a logistical and even physical disconnect...that can easily go hand in hand with poverty, falling through the cracks, abandoned by society..

..but lack of integration is different. I think this is more where opportunities are there, places in society are open, but people don't feel valued/belonging. You are right to say why not go listen to goth (and its not a bad parallel, the spoiled moody teenager feeling misunderstood in the suburban bedroom!). And of course there will always be people who feel this way, not matter how cohesive a society is, but the more atomised one is, surely the more likely? and thats why i think this is less to do with poverty (and anyway, even if it was poverty, its never poverty per se...its inequality)

Yep: "it's not the ridiculous young men but the more sinister old men you have to worry about"

Which is why multiculturism-combined-with-relativism was such a stupid idea. In practice it meant leaving the field open to crazy ideologues, and everyone else being too timid to do anything about it. Leading to the ridiculous young men withdrawing/being withdrawn from the rest of society and into their own isolated culture, one where no-one thinks bombing ordinary folk is a bit strange. Like a handful of animals reaching an uninhabited island and quickly mutating into a different, weird species - the genes were there all along, but the rest of the population kept them in check.

I don't think lack of integration, more generally, is a problem. Our society is packed with institutions which you can join/use/work for/post messages on/go out for a drink with, as you wish. Take a look at this: http://www.slate.com/id/2169614/nav/tap1/ and think about how many others there are that we take for granted. Some people need a lot of them, others don't.

Beyond this, I don't actually know what you're advocating, Filey. I don't think we are atomised, and even if you wanted us to be less so, I don't see what you could do about it. All the things that you might want to introduce already exist. Making them compulsory would just piss off everyone who likes making their own decisions for themselves.

Western society/capitalism priviledges the individual above the structure/society, (the americans pay at least lip service to the notion of a structure...'america'...the british don't even do that..the dutch even less so?).

This is where the difference between isolation and non-integration comes in. isolation is an extreme case, a logistical and even physical disconnect...that can easily go hand in hand with poverty, falling through the cracks, abandoned by society..

..but lack of integration is different. I think this is more where opportunities are there, places in society are open, but people don't feel valued/belonging. You are right to say why not go listen to goth (and its not a bad parallel, the spoiled moody teenager feeling misunderstood in the suburban bedroom!). And of course there will always be people who feel this way, not matter how cohesive a society is, but the more atomised one is, surely the more likely? and thats why i think this is less to do with poverty (and anyway, even if it was poverty, its never poverty per se...its inequality)

-- Filey Camp, Wednesday, 4 July 2007 07:41 (1 hour ago) Link

ok, we really do have to wait for the full audit on this case, because i really don't think that foreign doctors working in the UK come under your headings. i don't think they suffer particularly from inequality -- no more than a lot of people of all ethnicities. as i said, they are probably as atomized as most transient workers.

i think muslim communities -- this, i'm afraid, is not based on enough first-hand knowledge -- are pretty cohesive, on the whole. and there will be people who will leap in to say 'too cohesive'! i can see british muslims feeling a lack of belonging to wider british society, but that isn't entirely a matter of capitalism and individualism. unless there's a large muslim left-wing movement. a lot of the left-wing yearning for community values strikes me as part of its religious (methodist) heritage, tbh.

i think we are more atomised, but i think thats partly an inevitable consequence of postindustrial capitalism

All the things that you might want to introduce already exist. Making them compulsory would just piss off everyone who likes making their own decisions for themselves.

im not advocating anything per se, and im certainly not in favour of introducing anything compulsory, this isnt really an institutions thing, more a mindset thing

think muslim communities -- this, i'm afraid, is not based on enough first-hand knowledge -- are pretty cohesive

well i can only reply without enough first-hand knowledge, but the impression i get is one of a generation split to an extent, but not so much against westernized/compliant parents, but against traditionalist parents (pakistan/india)..not really so sure about more recent immigrants (somalia, yemen).

a lot of the left-wing yearning for community values strikes me as part of its religious (methodist) heritage, tbh.

im sure this is absolutely true.

to an extent i think we haven't really figured out what to do with what would have once made up our manufacturing/industrial sector

Anyway...its easy to overstate what's actually happening here...but I basically wanted to refute the idea that this comes from impoverishment

the right-wing reply to that is that it isn't down to 'we' to make that decision. i mean even ed, upthread, said society shouldn't all be about top-down decisions, right? but in reality of course, you enable an 'enterprise culture' and surprise, surprise, you still have vast unemployment.

i don't know if this is pertinent to the bomber mindset. i think the 7/7 guys were relatively comfortably off. but if you don't think it's about impoverishment, then what's the problem with deindustrialization? the absence of the dignity of labour and and the close-knit company-town community?

there might not be a problem with deindustrialization per se, but it can lead to lesser cohesion (this isnt necessarily a problem, depends how you look at it...opportunity/enterprise/freedom all require a slackening of cohesion/ties)

you are right about the 'we'...who is the 'we'? i'd like to think it means 'society', not something topdown imposed. what does that mean? I think that whats interesting is when attitudes to immigration in france, the uk, and america are contrasted, its not extrapolated to its logical conclusion. attitudes to new arrivals from abroad are often not dissimilar to attitudes to new...children. ie...its not just about how 'immigrants fit in' but about how generations fit in

Real actual bomb-making stuff story

atomization and anomie affects white crazy people too i guess :/

Of course it does!

lol i was kidding

pete yr link no workee

the plot thickens, or rather does not.

pete's link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/farright/story/0,,2118215,00.html

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

OMG WTF

anyone who saw channel 4 news, wtf, the cambridge nexus of three of these terrorist blokes was about 100m from where i sit.

the glasgow/london ones, not the bnp.

so anyway, i can tell you stories about the anomie and isolation of life in north cambridge.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3345743&page=1

the 500 or so patrons who partied late at the 1,700-person occupancy nightclub that perhaps best symbolizes London's vital nightlife scene.

Good of ABC to publicise this so future bombers know not to make the same mistakes

hahaha acrobat that sentence is gold!! americans in not-doing-irony indeed

the 500 or so patrons who partied late at the 1,700-person occupancy nightclub

?? does it not make much money then?

those 500 or so patrons each had table service and at least two £100 bottles of vodka

http://photos-c.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v77/45/40/577570421/n577570421_696434_5534.jpg

http://www2.b3ta.com/host/creative/33106/1183390755/b2tt.jpg

The Boyler's one is actually a bit funny!

I think Chris Morris may have written today's Evening Standard splash headline:

NHS REVOLVING DOOR OF TERROR

i'm waiting for a memo about how we're going to process foreign doctors in the future. as is they produce a document which is at least 400pp long, which is then scrutinized by four consultants (and yrs truly). i guess we'll add a question saying "do you hate freedom?" or something.

Speaking of Morris, isn't he still working on that movie on suicide bombers?

i guess we'll add a question saying "do you hate freedom?" or something.

-- That one guy that hit it and quit it, Friday, July 6, 2007 3:41 PM

reminds me of an american childhood, by annie dillard, in which she writes of her mother: "she regarded the instructions on bureaucratic forms as straight lines. 'do you advocate the overthrow of the united states government by force or violence?' after some thought she wrote, 'force.'"

I'm visualising a Day Today graphic of a revolving door, with glum-looking junior doctors trooping out as stereotypical terrorists — dressed like the ones who are waved through the metal detector at the start of Airplane! — saunter inside with evil grins on their faces.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/world/europe/08britain.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

so so weird. guy lived above local curry place. worked in staples.

Fox News quickly turned this into an anti-universal healthcare talking point: "We would need to import terrorist doctors like these ones," said Bill O'Reilly.

I also got to watch some other dickhead argue with an intelligent English dude about "War On Terror" being an abstraction. "Come on, these are just semantics," said the Fox dickhead. No matter what was said, dickhead kept approaching the 'semantics' angle again and again. Calmly and repeatedly, the English dude kept responding, "In England, we are very upset about this so-called 'War On Terror' because if you have a war, you name the enemy and you fight that named enemy." Dickhead couldn't seem to comprehend this, even after it was pointed out that this generalized abstraction got us into Iraq which was not the home of the enemy.

How about a War On Crime, dickhead? Think that would ever be over? Let's have a War On Crime!

Then, for some incomprehensible reason, Richard Dawkins actually appeared on the O'Reilly factor and got yelled at by dickhead supreme for about 5 minutes. I guess this is an old interview that was repeated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxdrNDNm-Ho

Fox is not good to watch on vacation if you're trying to de-stress.

But, back to the original topic. Does it seem weird that this new doctor breed of terrorists surfaced on the same day that Michael Moore's SiCKO movie hits box offices (June 29th) and Fox immediately has it all figured out that this NHS type of universal healthcare in America would leave America "wide open for terrorism" and that importing foreign doctors is a "breeding ground for terrorists?" Seems a little strange to me.

it is very interesting how different the (so far) three sets of identified UK bombers have been. the 7/7ers were born here, or in the north, and apparently led quite contented and rooted lives. the 21/7 guys were refugees from nw africa, and perhaps less well settled in london. the cambridge cell were highly skilled migrant workers, mostly, who had not been here long.

the fox commentary sounds predictably insane and off-topic.

MORON TERROR

Yes! I was coming here to post that headline. Not as good as "RACIST IN PEACE", but still.

hang on, that's an actual headline?!?!?!?!?!

Yeah, front page of The Sun this morning.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2003410014,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6780898,00.html

bang-up job guyz