A truck plowed into a dense crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France; the stories coming out say about 60 are dead and a hundred or more injured.
We’re at the point of just nothing but weekly chaos, it seems, and chaos helps no one.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Steel yourself for the usual douchebags claiming that the best answer to the lorry driver is to become even more murderous and bloodthirsty than him.
All early indications are that this is a bad business, whether or not it ultimately transpires to be a terrorist attack. It looks like the next few hours will repeat the usual depressing pattern of escalating casualty estimations.
Reports are still very unreliable, but now there are reports of additional gunfire and talk of hostage situations in the vicinity.
The interior ministry released a statement half an hour ago affirming that the rumors of hostage situations were hoaxes
laurentweppe @ 1;
Claims that will be made despite the fact that, if this does transpire to be a terrorist attack, it was performed by driving a heavy goods vehicle into a crowd, and there is nothing much that idiots toting guns could do about that. There is no easy way of knowing the mind of very given heavy vehicle driver, and all it takes is a quick twist of the wheel and jab of the accelerator to potentially cause absolute carnage. By the time some John Wayne wannabe gets their piece clear of their holster the damage would already be done, and it is not that easy to stop a large vehicle moving at speed with a handgun in any case. Besides, killing the driver wouldn’t magically arrest the forward momentum of a ton plus of steel, and the possibility of ricochets would present another threat.
Even more worryingly, there is the great likelihood that the supposed ‘good guy with a gun’ would simply compound the tragedy by spraying gunfire in the general direction of the vehicle in an undisciplined panic (how many civilians, who spend a couple of hours a week on a gun range at best and have no further training, are going to be able to maintain a cool head when a large lorry is bearing down on them at speed?) thus serving only to exacerbate the body count, assuming that they didn’t just start taking potshots at any passerby they thought looked ‘suspicious’ (read; of vaguely Middle Eastern or Asian appearance).
I live in Stillwater, Oklahoma where a girl drove her car into a homecoming parade killing 4 and injuring over 40 last October. I can’t begin to understand the motivation people that commit these atrocities have.
laurentweppe @ 3;
Well, that is something at least. Thanks for the clarification.
Chaos helps authoritarian leaders consolidate their power over xenophobes.
This attack illustrates one of the problems with the approach of attempting to fight terrorism primarily through intelligence operations and military action*. Even a complete surveillance state could not prevent this sort of act. No great planning or interperson communications required. Just one pissed off individual. It’s probably safe to assume that it will be replicated.
Only addressing the root causes of why people are driven to murder random innocents has a chance of succeeding in the long run. E.g. poverty, famine, religion, historical grudges, overpopulation, lack of effective democratic representation, accessibility of mental health care. That’s not to suggest that any of it would be easy, just that bombing the shit out of countries seems to be having a rather negative result. It just cheapens life further.
*There are absolutely situations where use of force is the only remaining option, but it often seems like it’s the the first choice.
Just saw this. Shaking again. So much loss, so much grief.
Shit, I must have accidentally deleted racism/xenophobia in my #8 when holding down the backspace too long*. Even though it wasn’t intended to be a complete list, they really need to be in there.
*I hate when it switches to deleting whole words instead of characters. I really have to figure out if it can be disabled.
Apparently the official toll as of 9p.m. EST is 77 deceased, 50+ injured. So far no official claim of responsibility by any terrorist organization. Doesn’t seem to be a lot of details coming out yet, Only eyewitness reports mostly. An NBC journalist was there on vacation and this all happened right in front of the apartment he was renting.
Pres. Obama’s statement:
Likely many nations will have lost citizens. Eyewitness said that he heard as much English and other languages on the street as French.
Pres. Hollande to make public address any minute now.
The police were shooting at the driver and eventually killed him. The Guardian says the truck traveled 2 km. This sort of thing is very difficult to defend against. The driver was armed, so this wasn’t an impulsive act. I hope this doesn’t increase support for Le Pen.
So France will be even more militarized, including extending the state of emergency another three months.
On Bastille Day.
Killing the driver wouldn’t get their foot off of the gas pedal, either. And besides Le Pen and other European nationalists, I’m concerned about how this may help Trump. Speaking of whom, he called off his VP announcement set for 11a.m. EST. I know it’s crocodile tears, but it raises an interesting scenario. All signs pointed to Pence as his pick (he flew to NJ today and is spending the night at Trump’s golf course there), but if I understand correctly, Pence only has until noon to file for or officially withdraw from the Indiana gubernatorial race.
the irony is tragic. not much else to say. :(
What is ironic about this situation?
My condolences to family and friends of the victims.
84 dead, 18 still in critical care.
Going by the documents found in the truck, the attacker was Tunisian with residence in France, know to authorites for criminal activities and violence, but not to anti-terrorist forces.
(source, following live: Le Monde)
Italy tightens security at border controls at the road and train crossings with France.
(source, following live: The Guradian)
I’m not sure I see much irony here either. Bastille Day celebrates the uprising of the Parisian population against the injustices of the Royal regime and its corrupt government, but the beginning of the revolution marked the escalation of rioting and armed conflict within France and gave plenty of disgruntled groups the opportunity to unleash violence on others. Nobody believes that the Storming of the Bastille and subsequent revolution were peaceful, and you would have to be a raving uber-nationalist to believe that the revolutionaries themselves were not flawed individuals who pursued some unsavoury policies alongside noble ones. One wonders whether our lorry driver murderer thought himself in their image, or was just taking advantage of the fact there were crowds present.
There is no excuse for this outrage of course. It’s pretty horrible.
I am also deeply uneasy that so much of the speculation surrounding this horror (though thankfully not much of the speculation here) is leaping straight to the usual narrative of Islamic State terrorism. The fact that the driver was of North African descent is not going to help with this. I suppose in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan it does make for a coherent pattern.
It could well be. I’m not dismissing the possibility. There are plenty of other tensions in French society that might be relevant too however. Particularly the short shrift that immigrants from North Africa tend to get, especially at the hands of the nationalists. I really don’t want to see this spark fresh xenophobia and give succour to the nastiest elements in French society.
France has been militarized and has been “cracking down” on terrorism for months or years. The result? The most terrorist attacks in Europe, not even counting those it exported to Belgium. Increased security isn’t working. Time to try something else. Like, maybe, not treating every Islamic person like a terrorist to the point that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
French police at least is careful in not being willing to say anything about motives of the attacker.
Der Spiegel is reporting that the attacker is specifically not known to have any radical political ideology. This may be just a “normal” mass murderer like we get in the US all the time, but using an LKW instead of a gun.
LKW=truck/semi and I need linguistic decontamination.
This is incredibly sad and no time for speculation as to the motives of the killer.
That being said I am also furious at the implicit victim blaming by dianne #22
There are millions of Muslims in France and the suggestion they all get treated like terrorists and that the French kind of invite this backlash is obscene.
Although it’s not the first time that french bashing is gleefully practiced on this blog by commenters.
@26: So Sarkozy saying he wanted to use a fire hose on the “scum” in the Banlieue isn’t acting in a prejudicial way against immigrants, specifically Muslims? Banning clothing specifically and almost exclusively by Muslims isn’t a prejudicial act? Police in France never harass triple amputees? There have never been riots in the Banlieue? LePen isn’t popular because of her anti-immigrant stance? Good to know. The police in the US are also entirely innocent and have no idea at all where the distrust comes from. Also, no Trump supporter ever had a biased thought in their lifetimes.
Well, it’s never the right time for evidence-less speculation on any attacker’s motives. But for talking about them, once we find out at least something? DEFINITELY. Because Hollande already made a statement that “Nothing will make us yield in our will to fight terrorism. We will further strengthen our actions in Iraq and in Syria. We will continue striking those who attack us on our own soil”, only a couple of hours after the attack.
dianne #27
Did I ever say Sarkozy’s not a racist dog-whistle using bastard ? Did I say there is no racism or discrimination against Muslims in France (or indeed racists) ? (and I’m not going to answer your comments on Trump and the US police because I don’t see the relevance).
Because of course there are !! (as you point out, le Pen voters for one)
I specifically objected to your
To me, this reads like victim-blaming and saying they invite this response.
Having said that, I am very emotional and upset about this whole situation and if I misread or misinterpreted you then I apologise.
I’ve often argued that one person in a truck could do as much damage as an armed individual. And I’ve wondered why this hasn’t happened more often as vehicles are so much more accessible to the general public.
Sadly this is probably only the first of many, considering the death toll others will undoubtedly be inspired by this.
Le Grande Duduche @29: I apologize for the implication that all French people are to blame. That is clearly false. What I meant and the reason I made the analogy with policy and beliefs in the US is that the French government seems to be enacting policies that are prejudicial to Islamic people, regardless of their political or social views and that these policies are not only not working to protect France, they are actively making France more dangerous.
Hollande’s statement seems to be implying that the French government will increase the use of force to try to end political terrorism (which this latest incident may or may not have been). This strikes me as exactly the wrong move.
In terms of the French people, I think it’s telling that when the burka ban was being proposed, a number of non-Islamic French people protested it as unfair. And when radical Islamic elements in France started mumbling threats in retaliation, Islamic French people were the ones to tell them not to do it. That suggests that the majority of French people think of themselves as one people, regardless of religion, not “French” or “Islamic” and I hope that that view will prevail.
dianne@31 : thank you very much for your reply and I agree of course that the increase of force or militarisation won’t solve this problem and might even radicalise people. It’s just terribly sad and I too hope the values of the republic will prevail.
84 confirmed dead so far…
— — —
Totally OT, but I had to include *some* good news: An Alzheimers vaccine targeting *both* tau and amyloid-beta is on the horizon
“Progress in world’s first Alzheimer’s vaccine” http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-07-world-alzheimer-vaccine.html
Excuse me if I don’t weep a river of tears for 80 privileged people. I have no tears left after mourning the thousands of unremarked deaths directly attributable to Western policy of oppression and racism.
The selective attention paid to this crime, and the weighting accorded it, is itself rampant bigotry.
This may not be a popular view. It is however undeniably true.
Cartimandua,
This statement is true:
This however:
is one of those thoughts that belong only into your head. You don’t need to drop a single tear for any of them, but please be kind enough not to contemptuously share that with everyone.
“I have no tears left”.
Yes this is a tragedy for the families and friends of those who died. But the conditioned mourning displayed by wider western society is nauseating in its bilious arrogance and unstated prejudice. I will not partake. And your desire to silence this thought is itself tinged with taint.
I feel strongly on this.
@Cartimandua #34:
Sure there is some bigotry in how we relate to stuff like this. But I don’t see any privilege left in a corpse on the street.
@Erlend Meyer #30
Well, you argued correctly. One such case happend in former Czechoslovakia in the 70, where a woman drove a truck into a group of people deliberately to kill as many as possible. And she has decided to perform her murder thusly because it was too difficult to obtain automatic weapon or explosives.
___________
I fear this is just another tragedy in the long lasting line of tragedies that will only pile up and escalate in the future. I fear lynchings of POC in ragefilled retaliation are not far.
Cartimandua,
I have nothing against your contempt for the duplicity on the part of loud mourners (I look here mostly at the world leaders and media as those setting the tone) who are nowhere to be seen when people die outside of Europe. I just don’t think there’s need for contempt for the victims. That’s what I’m objecting to, not to what you were saying with “I have no tears left”. That, I can understand and respect.
Speaking of media framing of this and privilege, it was interesting to note that a couple of articles I read first thing in the morning specifically mentioned a couple of men who lost their mother crying to Allah as well as inlcuding photos of victims’ relatives in Muslim garb. It was almost like… like they were being sensitive of Muslims dying yesterday as well . Like they weren’t going to frame it as “Islam vs Europe” thing again. Too soon to hope, it seems.
Your choice, but I find your comment fucking repulsive. You are politicizing the tragedy as much as anyone on the right.
53 million people die every day around the world. The choice as to which are feted and mourned is indeed political.
I choose to mourn the oppressed and find the West’s obsessive celebration of the loss of “our own” sickening. A perpetuation of injustice.
So I see nothing positive in zeroing in on these 80 people while we exclude those how don’t make the grade. Just an obscene shiver of collective cultural fear and a demonising of the assailant and those minorities who presumably shared his faith, if not his desperation.
If you find my politics “fucking disgusting” you need to check your privilage.
{dead european civilians, dead Syrian civilians, dead Afghan civilians, dead African civilians, …}
People are assholes for selectively mourning a subset of victims. If you sought to join these assholes, congratulations.
I’m sure I do, but not because I find your comments repulsive. Sometimes people are simply repulsive.
Cartimandua, #41
The “East” does that too.
The assailant was a mass murderer.
Oh, exactly what was his “desperation” that justifies this mass murder? You assume to just magically understand why he did this because he was one of “those people”. Your overall comments are indeed repulsive. You are a callous asshole for saying these things about innocent people who were just brutally murdered. You are one of the very people you are lambasting.
My parents were on the beach for the fireworks, went back to their hotel after, and wondered why people were running down the street bumping into restaurant tables.
numerobis,
Must have been scary for them (and you) to learn what happened. *hugs*
And one of the precipitating factors was the amassing of troops in Paris, which revolutionaries rightly perceived as threatening and provocative. Of course I’m not suggesting that the situations are parallel (or that the Revolution was perfect and pure in every way), but the increased militarization of the country and the further extension of the state of emergency are displays of state power, not developments democrats should consider acceptable.
Here’s a statement from the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme this morning:
Saad – that you can’t see the problem with labeling a person, quite likely from an oppressed minority, as a mass murderer while America simply suspends the airmen who killed dozens of civilians in an Afghan hospital (after they got fucking frustrated at their job) tells me all I need to know about you.
I am not wishing evil on anybody but I am not going to buy into the media’s racial driven hype (designed to cement cultural superiority and in group values) either.
Bill, I will mourn people in proportion. Compared to what’s happened in the Middle East since 1918, Nice got a sigh over my rice bubbles. You appear to be an inch away from dropping an “all lives matter” while really meaning some matter more than others.
What is happening here is broadly analogous to what happened when Robin Williams killed himself and we all went crazy over a famous white man while Ferguson burned. The media play a bait and switch and closet racists that we are, society falls into line.
Where do you really stand that you think attacking me is the socially just thing to do?
@Cartimandua:
First of all: I get it. There is a huge bias in which deaths are reported, and no lives are inherently any more valuable than others. But humans aren’t capable of mentally handling the scope of the world, and all the tragedies within it. We focus most on our immediate family and best friends, then on our extended family and friends, then our local communities, then our “tribe” (generally country, but not always), and then on those tribes we see as most like our own. And in the latter cases, we focus only on exceptional events. In a country as populous as France, there were surely many more tragic deaths last night that happened outside of this event than happened in it, but an old woman dying in the hospital of heart failure is mundane – as tragic as it might be to her family – while a truck killing 84+ people is not, and so the latter gets reported.
It’s human nature. That doesn’t make it right, but it does mean that it’s almost impossible to fight it. And if you do want to fight it (to get people to focus on more-easily-prevented deaths, for instance), you’re going to have to take a much different approach. The way you came into this thread will probably come across to many people as attacking them for mourning this event, which will put them on the defensive and make them less likely to listen to you. If you’d even just left out your first sentence of your first comment here, it would have worked a lot better.
Cartimandua,
You’re behaving like an ass.
Is yesterday’s attack in NIce suddenly not a mass murder and the perpetrator not a mass murderer because American government is denying their army is committing mass murders too? What the actual fuck? Are you giving any thought at all to what you are writing.
If anything makes someone a mass murderer then it’s murdering dozens of people. It’s not a political statement, it’s the word you use for people who kill dozens of other people!
[My comment isn’t appearing, and when I try to repost I get a duplicate-comment message. I’ll try it without the quote at the end. I apologize in advance if it shows up more than once.]
And one of the precipitating factors was the amassing of troops in Paris, which revolutionaries rightly perceived as threatening and provocative. Of course I’m not suggesting that the situations are parallel (or that the Revolution was perfect and pure in every way), but the increased militarization of the country and the further extension of the state of emergency are displays of state power, not developments democrats should consider acceptable.
Here’s a statement from the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme this morning.
test
Infophile,
Pretty much.
But now they have gone into fully incoherent mode, because suddenly calling a mass murderer a mass murderer is prejudice or something.
[Don’t know why my comment isn’t appearing, but I’ll remove a few words and try again.]
And one of the precipitating factors was the amassing of troops in Paris, which revolutionaries rightly perceived as threatening. Of course I’m not suggesting that the situations are parallel (or that the Revolution was perfect in every way), but the increased militarization of the country and the further extension of the state of emergency are displays of state power, not developments democrats should consider acceptable.
Here’s a statement from the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme this morning:
I give up. My comment won’t appear and I don’t know why.
I (and I’m sure others) are not disputing the well-known “cute little white girl missing” phenomenon. I’m saying that anyone who comments that they will shed no tears for the little white girl is repulsive, and is making a variation of the same error.
I hate that kind of argument by intimidation. Nothing substantive, simply some passive aggressive “I’m not saying you are a racist but you are dangerously close…” bullshit. And you know what? Not as the political statement “All Lives Matter” which is a signal of racists, but I do support a simple uncapitalized non-political reality: all human lives really do matter.
There, I’ve just given you some low-hanging fruit for quote-mining.
Cartimanuda, #46
He was a mass murdered. He murdered 84 people.
What exactly do you know about the 84 people who were killed? How do you know 7 of them weren’t from an oppressed minority? How do you know 3 of them weren’t victims of domestic abuse? How do you know some weren’t children?
Get your head out of your ass. Your treatment of brown Muslims as a monolith is racist and condescending. Mourning these people’s deaths isn’t wrong because of drones. And the media mourning their deaths disproportionately is not the fault of the dead and is certainly not the fault of their loved ones who are devastated right now. Just like the relatives of those people killed by drones are. They’re going through the same thing.
You can keep treating these 84 individual humans as somehow a single entity that is somehow worth less than civilians attending a wedding in Afghanistan.
These were 84 individual people with lives worth every bit as much as the Afghanis killed by drones. Many of them must have felt immense agony and fear as they were dying.
Your attitude is part of the problem. You’re merely the counterpart to the Western assholes who say they don’t feel bad for civilian casualties.
From the Guardian’s article on the event: “…the proportion of children killed and injured is unprecedented in France. At least 10 are thought to have died, and medical sources said another 50 had been taken to hospital overnight, many with life-threatening injuries.”
I think a lot of modern massacres happen because they are easy. All the parts are in place to do something terrible, just find the right lunatic/cult/whatever and plug him in.
Our civilization is made of unprecedentedly huge populations of civilians concentrated in very small places, and higher and higher energy technology lying around everywhere; passenger jets, semi trucks, and of course guns, guns guns. Also remember Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attack on a subway. None of these required a lot of money, people or talent.
It bothers me that everyone on TV frames this as a political question, as if all we can and should do is to somehow control people’s intentions, and then everything will be fixed. You can’t kill or arrest all of the lunatics, there is an endless supply.
There still remain many more cheap, stupid ways to kill lots of people that haven’t been tried yet. If we don’t re-engineer our physical world with lunatics factored in, no political or military act will stop the massacres.
Also, a quote from a witness: “…There were so many Muslim people who were victims because I could see they had scarves over their head and some were speaking Arabic.”
Cartimandua, #46
Not even close.
“All lives matter” is what racist people say when black people try to get justice and fair treatment.
Is anyone here responding to Pakistani protests against drone strikes with “but Americans get killed by bombs too!”
dianne, #55
LOL!
The privileged little shits.
Let’s get our definitions right. This man is a mass murderer but the perpetrators of western initiated political mass murders are ….. Politicians ? Servicemen? Because that’s how our society treats and labels them.
But sure, label him a vanilla killer. Maybe you will condescend to ‘insane’? Or maybe he is the product of other forces that should be recognised and not shorthanded away?
Now almost every death is a tragedy. I get it. And we find little reason to care in general. But here the media can whip us into a frenzy with a clash of civilisation narrative and a ‘you could be next’ – off the circus goes.
To repeat. I have no tears BECAUSE I have shed them already for the unreported., western manipulated, vast toll of misery in the Middle East. And until there is proper and proportionate representation I will leave it to you good people to shed them for me.
Oh, so privilage is age related now? You are new at this aren’t you?
[One more try – I’ve removed a few more words.]
One of the precipitating factors was the amassing of troops in Paris. Of course I’m not suggesting that the situations are parallel (or that the Revolution was perfect in every way), but the increased militarization of the country and the further extension of the state of emergency are displays of state power, not developments democrats should consider acceptable.
Here’s a statement from the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme this morning:
Maybe the eighth time’s a charm – I’ve removed a few more words and also a link. What could be holding up this comment?
One of the precipitating factors was the amassing of troops in Paris. Of course I’m not suggesting that the situations are parallel (or that the Revolution was perfect in every way), but the increased militarization of the country and the further extension of the state of emergency are displays of state power, not developments democrats should consider acceptable.
Here’s a statement from the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme this morning:
Cartimandua #61
That was sarcasm.
Are you new at this?
Cartimundua @ # 41: 53 million people die every day around the world.
Hey, you’re only off by a factor of about three hundred.
But, please, keep it up: you’re doing much better at statistics than you are at basic humanity.
I guess if your supply of compassion is that limited you’re right to apportion it stingily.
Cartimandua,
For the last time, calling a murderer of a mass of people a “mass murderer” is not a political statement.
If you have any integrity, you should recognize how ridiculous it is to compare it to calling him insane. Are we going to cause mass murderers to be treated unfairly in society because we’re handing out the title too easily and giving mass murder unfairly negative connotations?
—
Is this person serious?
I…hope…that in amongst the “get tough on terrorist” responses to this event, the French government takes a moment to think about engineering. Terrorism isn’t going away any time soon, even in the best case, and simple murder certainly isn’t. We can’t get rid of trucks, so the “weapon” will continue to be available. But doing something like placing temporary concrete barriers every 1/2 kilometer could maybe reduce the amount of damage a person with a truck could do. This would also help for cases like someone having a heart attack and losing control of their vehicle and running into a crowd. Also, some witnesses reported an inadequate emergency response to the event. I don’t have enough data to say whether that was a reasonable criticism or not, but maybe looking at future events with the worst case scenario in mind might result in a quicker response and more people in the hospital instead of the morgue?
I’m not sure I necessary agree with that. Word choice is political – that’s why white shooters are always ~troubled youths full of potential~, while nonwhite shooters are terrorists or thugs.
That being said, I’m not saying it’s wrong to call this person a mass murderer, which he clearly is. I’m moreso of the opinion that we under-utilize that term towards groups that it would otherwise apply to (see: like every fucking president ever)
Well, yeah? Hence ageism?
SC (Salty Current)
The right wing (and some of the more center-right) are already calling for making the sate of emergency permanent. And I’m afraid there is a real chance of this becoming reality after the next elections.
The terrorists are winning. And the authoritarians in the West are gleefully rubbing their hands.
Beatrice
I hope not.
Going to see the fireworks on a national holiday means a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds mix together in a giant crowd, where a large truck rolling through will not differentiate between those privileged and those not privileged. I don’t know how Cartimandua can just look at those 84 lives and write them off as privileged and not an ounce of actual sympathy. France is a wonderfully diverse country; I doubt they were all white, or all rich, or all heterosexual, or…
dianne
I’d wonder what kind of emergency response to something like this could possibly be deemed ‘adequate’. I doubt any of the emergency services, even on terror alert, would have been prepared for something like this; I’m more inclined to believe they were prepared for an average type Bastille, and were caught as unawares as everyone else. Maybe they shouldn’t have been? Maybe they should have prepared for this scenario, too, I don’t know? I’m inclined to believe they were briefed about potential terror attacks, but a truck? It takes a moment for the human brain to adjust for the unexpected.
Also: often in cases like this, it’s a balance between making sure the scene is safe and getting the emergency teams out there faster. It’s entirely possible that they’ve had some training on not rushing in too quickly (until the police, say, give an all-clear) in case there’s a second attack targetting emergency responders (this happens). I dunno, that certainly contributes to how quickly people can be treated (esp. those critically injured), but I doubt any response is actually ‘adequate’ when something like this happens. :/ (At the same time, I hesitate to say they were actually inadequate; I’m pretty sure an analysis of the first response will show up at some future training course.)
@34
Good luck regaining your humanity. 84 people died, many of them children. If you honestly don’t care that so many died, including children, because “privileged”, then you need to do some serious looking in the mirror and figure out where the hell your humanity wandered off to.
Funny that: from what I’ve seen and heard (and I’m there, in Nice, right now), the emergency response, especially from the doctors and paramedics was swift and efficient.
A story of heroism from the attack:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/07/15/person-jumped-in-front-of-truck-to-help-stop-rampage.html?via=desktop&source=copyurl
NO links found to any kind of terrorist group, but there’s the road rage incident.
It might turn out France prolonged the state of emergency because of a (possible) extreme road rage incident? Speculation, I know, but that’s the only thing evidence points to right now.
(source)
Ah, the stink of xenophobia. Doesn’t he realize his fellow Poles are also targets of xenophobia in western countries? Multicultural politics he decries include treating them and their culture with the same regard as whatever country the immigrated to.
@75 Beatrice
The “We will not be intimidated” argument tends to be the argument yelled by the leadership as they not only take away the rights of the people but convince them it’s a good idea to do so. Very sad.
We will not be intimidated! Lost to political correctness!
Truly a progressive and nuanced view. I can’t wait to see what the local excuse of a political collective will have to say.
That, and the guy also was a certified wife-beater.
***
There’s a french word for that: Matamore (literally “Maur Slayer” an ironically accurate etymology given the context): a braggard fake-brave who boast about how badass he is, always favor the most violent approach but is the first the capitulate once facing an actual threat.
source
Re irony: when I read up on Bastille Day, one of the things mentioned as a cause was objection to increased militarization by the French leaders.
I suspect that was what Ichthyic was referring to in #16.
Cartimandua @ 34;
I fully understand your point about the biased reporting of many media outlets when it comes to acts of political violence, with undue weighting for those that occur in the Western World, but do you really think that it is helpful to engage in what essentially amounts to a ‘dear Muslima’ argument over the corpses of 84 innocent people? Yes, Western powers do terrible things, and yes, larger numbers of people die in other parts of the world with far less media attention paid to those tragedies, but that doesn’t justify your comments – greater loss of life elsewhere in the world does not mean innocent loss of life in Nice is somehow meaningless.
You have entered the thread with a form of words that strongly implies that the lives of the victims of this crime are of lesser value than those of other people, a monstrous position you have tried and miserably failed to justify based upon the notion that, because the American military makes unethical use of drone warfare that kills large numbers of innocent people then… what exactly? That the lives of the civilians lost last night are of lesser value, or even that the victims deserved to die? You know nothing of the victims – you don’t know how many of the victims were anti-war, how many were Muslims, or members of marginalized societal groups. We do know that at least 10 of the dead were children, with many more seriously injured. Do you have no tears or their crushed little bodies because they were born into the wrong society? Is it that for you they spoke the wrong language? Is it because the political leaders of a country they can’t vote for twice over – once because they aren’t American citizens and once because they are children – have committed acts that should be considered war crimes? Since when were children acceptable targets in retaliation for the actions of political leaders?
You talk of privilege? Fine. Lets ignore the actual victims for a moment, and lets imagine that they were all cis/het, middle class White men. That is a nice easy goal for you – explain to me why the butchery of 84 generally socially privileged men should be viewed as of so little import that it need not even be remarked upon because greater numbers of lives are lost in other parts of the world? Explain to me how human suffering and loss should be rendered down into a mere numbers game. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
While we await your best Don Quixote impression, I would suggest that the fact that a person possesses societal privilege is a failing of the society that unduly privileges them. Should they abuse that privilege further for their own advancement, then they become morally culpable, but the possession of social privilege you never asked for in and of itself does not somehow magically render one’s life worthless, else murdering any person with more privilege than oneself should not be considered criminal or morally reprehensible, a problematic proposition to say the least. To argue otherwise is simply to uncritically embrace another, equally insidious form of bigotry that masquerades as prating virtue.
Finally, you may be well served by considering that the victims of Nice were actual people with actual lives and loved ones, and your need to express your indignation over injustices in the broader world does not somehow trump their humanity. Has it occurred to you that their relatives and friends may read your self indulgent posturing on this thread? Have you considered how that might compound their grief? Or do you have no tears for widows and orphans either?
Tell me, just how shallow is your pool of empathy? Did you sell it off cheaply along with your humanity in order to get just one more hit of sweet, sweet faux-righteous indignation?
We bomb and invade with “impunity” because third worlders simply must endure whatever is inflicted on them. Then we wonder why they are trying to bring violence and chaos home to us.
I do not wish to pile on you Cartimandua, but I have a itch that needs scratching. I want to note that there are far, far better places and contexts to talk about priviliege than over dead bodies of – at least- 84 mothers, fahters, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, relatives and friends. You sound to me as a perfect straw SJW that some privileged white men with a loudmouth like to argue about/against. Cartimandua, you really are not sounding any better than a straw Vulcans who try to pretend that human emotions are completely irrelevant and are a sign of inferiority. In fact some asshole trying to pick a bone with SJW might try to say exactly the same things you do and expecting roaring approval in order to get some reference point to point to later on and show that SJW are just as heartless and repulsive and simple/narrow-minded as jihadists are. Only anti-SJW assholes are never that clever, so I just think you’re a SJW asshole. This only confirms my lifelong experience that assholes are everywhere.
Speaking of loudmouths, apparently there’s an ongoing coup d’état in Turkey as I write this line.
@84
Indeed, and about damn time. Between the political assassinations, erosion of secular institutions and government venues, and subjugation of free speech, Erdogan didn’t look like he was going to be leaving any other way.
laurentweppe @ 84;
Unfortunately, a military coup in Turkey justified as ‘defending the secular values of the Turkish state’ from the current more theistically inclined government has been on the cards for a while now.
From the BBC News website;
There are few stronger indications that an event is a coup than a statement like this. Get ready for a whole new round of horse trading around the toxic issue of immigration within EU Capitols. Turkey has been held up as a bulwark against mass migration from Syria and the broader Middle East (because callously turning your back on suffering from behind the cover of a proxy is so much less embarrassing) with minimal support to deal with the repercussions this has caused within Turkey itself for months now, but with this coup Turkey’s stability is very much in question, along with its ability to play doorman for Europe. Further waves of migrant-baiting bigotry deployed by the various far Right movements of Europe is inevitable, and unfortunately we have seen very recently just how effective that kind of rancid, bigoted scaremongering can be. Turkey could very easily burn, and all the while the likes of Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, and Nigel Farage will be eager to warm their figurative political hands on the fire.
Vivec @ 85;
Erdogan is an authoritarian with a nasty streak a mile wide, but I am not so sure a military coup will result in any better outcome on prior form. Once generals seize power they are also often loath to give it up, and on the principle that when you are a hammer every problem looks like a nail, civil unrest stirred by a coup is likely to be met with uncompromising force. There is no guarantee that this will do anything to impro0ve the lot of the Turkish citizenry.
That’s assuming the turkish army doesn’t follow in Sisi’s footsteps and replace an authoritarian demagogue with delusions of grandeur with an authoritarian general with delusions of grandeur
Well, be that as it may, a lot of my family and friends, both here and in Turkey, aren’t too bothered by the idea of Erdogan being carried out on a spike. A lot of us have been expecting this for years, and given that he was hell bent on subverting the political process to stay in power, I’m not sure what else one could do to get rid of him.
many many years ago I got into a conversation with a fellow at work one day. He talked about how much money we had been spending fighting in Vietnam and wondered if it would not have been cheaper and better if we had just gave that money to the people directly .just drop it out of B52’s even.
I had no answer for him in fact I still do not know and it is an idea and question that intrigues me still.
uncle frogy
Now Nicholas Burns is talking about all of the important concerns of the US government in responding to this, including – in all seriousness – what’s the “right thing to do in terms of our democratic values.” Chuck Todd is nodding away. Embarrassing.
Sorry – I meant to post that to the Moments of Political Madness thread. “This” was a reference to the coup in Turkey.
If it transpires the assailant was ‘just’ a bad man and not an IS metaphor – then those 84 people will depreciate markedly in the “give a damn” stakes. I am already seeing that in the news coverage.
It is sad and telling that some of you have such binary thinking. I say I’m not going to cry a river and this apparently means I don’t give a damn at all. No. I’m just not going to go the full 10 yards and elevate them above all the other concurrent misery we are causing – simply because they are from the right cultural club. I won’t even go 5 yards down that line of thinking.
Ask yourself what exactly was it that pushed these relative handful of deaths to the front page, the trending list, the 24 hours news … ?
Btw yep. 53 million people die every year. 151,000 a day. Sucks if yesterday was your day and you were one of the 150,920 people of no value to the western ideological narrative.
Wikipedia lists 25 nationalities for the 280+ victims.
To which do they all belong?
Oh you think the narrative is a world one eh – not one rooted in French Riviera, summer, ocean front, Bastille Day .
Try this for size. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/15/who-are-the-victims-of-the-nice-terror-attack/
Where is the focus there? We lead with an attractive young Russian girl with multiple photos. Then Americans. Then British (with a headline for the local punters). Then French. Then the ‘also ran’ other nationality grab bag section without pics – German, Ukrainian, Estonian.
I’m guessing these are your people.
Btw your Wikipedia article lists 190 of the 202 injured as nationality unknown -as well as 56 of the 84 killed.
Even if there was accurate information which supported your pitch, the whole thing, its significance and relevance, has been framed by the cultural war and terrorist challenge to France (a proxy for the West) motifs.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
chigau,
They are just repeating that this attack is in the press so much because of where and to who(m?) it happened.
Which I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with , it was only Cartimandua’s contempt for the victims that was questionable.
Islamic State claims responsibility for he attack. Was the attacker actually connected with them or not is still unknown.
Cartimandua
Or if you are a westerner, and of no value to Cartimandua.
Cartimandua @ 93;
Well, that is transparently disingenuous. What is sad and telling is that you are still trying so hard to find any excuse to dehumanize the victims of this atrocity simply because they had the gall to die in the ‘wrong’ city, or to be of the ‘wrong’ social grouping (even though they were far from a monolithic grouping, as has already been demonstrated to you). But don’t worry, nobody here is confused – you have made your contempt for the dead very clear indeed in more than just your repulsive drivel about ‘having no tears’. We understand all too well; your indignation means more to you than the lives of other people, so long as those victims belong to a societal group you have convinced yourself is worthless because of reasons that make sense only to you – you just lack the moral courage to admit it openly, which puts you somewhat south in the stakes of intellectual integrity to an open bigot, who at least has the dubious honour of being able to claim that they are honest.
I am still waiting for your answer, by the way. When are you going to get around to justifying your position that human death, loss and suffering should be rendered down into a numbers game? How do you quantify grief, exactly?
Greg, for those connected to any victim, death is of profound significance and not a numbers game.
When we as a society segment the 151,000 daily toll (numbers game? If you say so) to find high level meaning then we Inject values and the results are a litmus test of who we are.
Did you cry “a river of tears” for the 24 (Western) victims of the Andria train collision a few days ago – will we point our finger at the criminal incompetent who caused it?
Of course not. I doubt you were even aware it had happened. Boring story.
Will the media write individual profiles for each of the Turkish protesters killed? Three time the number killed in Nice. No. Wrong narrative.
Go on and justify your huge specific empathy for Nice though. Expend your limited emotional reserve on the darlings of the Imperialist cause. Heckle the fact I focus on oppressed segments and have little time for the banner stories of privilage. We clearly have different priorities.
@ Cartimandua # 102,
That’s not really the issue. It’s fine if you focus on different things and you’re even doing a service if you bring up other stories that people might not be aware of. You’d find a pretty welcoming audience here for things that are under the radar of western media.
The issue is that you showed up in a thread about a tragedy to say (paraphrasing) “I don’t give a rats ass about those privileged assholes who died”. Compassion is a valuable tool for stopping these never-ending wars. Comments like yours just make it worse.
Cartimandua @102,
Clearly. Your priority seems to be justifying and rationalizing your proud lack of empathy and humanity. If you were even halfway serious about caring so much about the tens of thousands of oppressed and marginalized people who die every day (so much so that you supposedly have no tears left for the Nice victims), you wouldn’t have any much time to devote to making an complete ass of yourself here. As it stands, you have made clear that you care far more about defending your own ill conceived and morally bankrupt position than about showing even a sliver of genuine care or compassion for anyone else.
Face it, you are a lying shit stirring sack of troll vomit. You don’t give two shits about anyone else and you’re proud about it. You couldn’t care less about the scores of daily deaths and you’re flailing around for a way to rationalize that.
Kindly fuck right off and don’t come back until you’ve acquired a new moral compass. Asshole.
First, to grammar nazi myself, it should be “rat’s ass”.
Second, it’s actually not just your (Cartimandua) comment that’s the problem, it’s your outlook. You may not realize this, but what you’ve expressed is the mirror image of that which you claim to despise. You complain about people being indifferent to the deaths of others right after you do the same fucking thing.
There’s plently of blame to go around for why the world is in the state it’s in and you won’t get any disagreement from me (or probably anyone else here) that the imperialist actions of the West are fucking disgusting. But shitting on a bunch of dead people and, by extension, anyone who cared about them isn’t going to improve anything.
Look in a damn mirror before you complain about the indifference of others.
And if you have a means of finding biographical information of the Turkish protestors, please link to it. It would probably get picked up as a blog post by someone on FTB. This goes for any people killed anywhere (who you deem to be sufficiently oppressed).
If you know something we don’t, why not spread the word? Heck, if you know a lot of that type of story, start your own blog. I suspect the bridge has already been burned due to you acting like an asshole, but FTB would likely have hosted it.
I’ll keep this simple.
The way events are presented and shaped for us is a construct of a media which supports Western privilege.
Events are placed into an ideologically weighted narrative to project and protect this privilege.
That is why the train crash, the protestor deaths and Nice are so differently packaged and impact us emotionally on different planes.
It’s why you won’t find protestor profiles with cute pictures.
It’s why you will find little to nothing on the suffering in non privileged nations.
It’s why I will measure out my tears (a metaphor for concern and emotional engagement).
Conceptually I feel loss for each and every death every day. In practice I focus on the losses that represent the greatest social injustices and react against that which seeks to confuse. I will not be led by the nose by western media concerns. YMMV.
And stop with the OMG tone/concern trolling. Either these 80 deaths truly deserve OTT 100% screen time and the resulting focus on our part or they matter no more (and no less) than the 1000’s of unreported deaths and we should feel appropriate anger at the PR manipulation.
Your choice.
Actually when you consider the injustice behind most “80 death” blocks in unprivileged nations the French experience may well “count for less” in some respects. Or do you disagree?
@ 111, 112 Cartimandua
Leaving aside the preposterousness of the latter statement, you say you feel loss, but it does not necessarily involve concern or emotional engagement.
You say being murdered at random is low on the scale of social injustices.
You say randomly murdering people in Turkey is more unjust than randomly murdering people in France.
Beatrice @103
More on the confusion surrounding the attacker: here; Daesh may have claimed he was a soldier for them, but so far there seem to be no definite ties, so they may just be claiming ‘responsibility’ because of who he was and who he killed.
rq,
It’s a bit of comfort that at least some people are acting responsibly by looking at facts instead of just accepting what both major sides are offering them as a foregone conclusion.
Local reporting is shit as usual, or rather those writing titles and editor notes should just all be fired:
Title : Radicalized Islamist
Article: talks about how none of his family thinks he was religious, just a violent asshole. Also mentions that no evidence has been found yet of connections to any islamists. *headdesk*
RIP Qandeel Baloch.
Worth a read:
http://www.theexmuslim.com/2016/07/16/honor-killing-qandeel-baloch-straw-broke-womans-heart/
(via)
Cartimandua @ 6;
Finally, you grudgingly more or less recognize the human tragedy of this atrocity, even for its ‘privileged’ victims and their families. That is progress of a sort at least, I suppose.
You do understand that we can just scroll back up the thread and read your earlier statements at our leisure, right? You can’t get away with hoping we will simply forget your words.
You @ 34;
(Emphasis added)
And again @ 41;
(Emphasis added)
And oh look – you @ 47;
For someone who claims that you aren’t trying to make grief all about numbers, you most assuredly do like bringing those numbers into the thread.
You are the one who dismissed the horror in Nice as meaningless because only 84 died compared to larger death tolls elsewhere – you made this a numbers game, not I.
I can’t watch the news every second of every day, and as you point out news coverage is unequal, and the decisions made by media outlets in what they choose to afford cover to is a legitimate cause for concern. One obviously doesn’t have to literally cry to recognize the tragedy of these deaths, but I think you know that. I still see the public interest and moral cause inherent in bringing the responsible party to account, and I certainly feel no motivation to denigrate the victims as ‘privileged’ and thus unworthy of consideration (Westerners? Who can afford to ride on a train? Clearly capitalist running dogs, neo-imperialist scum who had it coming, right?). Again, we can review your own words, and they do you no favours.
So, you presume to put offensive words in my mouth and callous emotions in my mind while knowing nothing of me? Seems to be a pattern with you. Still, should I suddenly die, you can have the warm feeling that I probably deserved it to, since you seem to have decided that I am some two dimensional villain from a Saturday morning cartoon by virtue of your puissant psychic powers or something. That is the difference between us; I despise you because of your words on this thread, the only evidence I have of your character. You despise the victims of Nice because they died in France, because media coverage of tragedy is inequitable, and because the US military has committed war crimes – none of which says anything about the victims as human beings or individuals, yet you still write them off as privileged as if you are the final arbiter of their worth. That is repugnant.
There you go again, seeking to weasel out of the full implications your own words earlier in the thread and refocus on the failings of the media. I remind you again of your own sentiments @ 34;
(emphasis added)
You explicitly made this about the social privilege that you assumed was possessed by the victims. You passed value judgements upon the worth of the victim’s lives based upon your assumptions about them, made without bothering to find anything out about them first and, to all appearances, without a moment spared to consider their humanity or that of their surviving relatives and loved ones. That is fundamentally different from complaining about media coverage.
You assume my empathy is so specific? Convenient for your disingenuous argument, but far from true. I concern myself with all manner of issues of social justice that affect all manner of social groupings and people of all levels of societal privilege all over the world, as my commenting history on this very website will attest. My empathy is not specific to Nice, but that doesn’t mean I must write off the victim there. Perhaps my emotional reserve is not as limited as you, in your truly towering arrogance, imagine. For all your pseudo-moralistic posturing, it might just be that I am not the monster you find it easy to imagine me to be, and you are not quite the shining avatar of virtue you think you see in the mirror. For truly decent human beings, there is no need to write off the deaths of the (relative) few to concern oneself with the deaths of the many. You don’t have to denigrate the victims of Nice to champion those, for instance, unjustly murdered in the US drone campaign. The fact that you seem to think that you do is something that you should urgently examine in yourself.
Maybe you just aren’t a very good person.
And lets not forget you charming little swipe at the victims, where again the mask you wear slips so readily. The dead of Nice are merely ‘darlings of the Imperialist cause’ to you? You still haven’t gotten the notion that the victims were people, killed horrendously, through that obstinate skull of yours, have you? Do you imagine that the legacy of imperialist foreign policy was exactly in the forefront of anyone’s mind when this atrocity happened, even that of the killer? Do you really understand so little of human motivation?
Still pretending this is about media coverage, much in the same way that the gamer-gaters pretend their obsession is about ethics in gaming journalism, I see. Your words have already betrayed you. If I am ‘heckling’ you at all, it is because you stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the humanity of the victims, and because you stick rigidly to the toxic notion that concern for the dead in Nice necessarily implies a lack of concern for those killed in any of the other horrific atrocities and needless tragedies that occur in the world, a glaring false dichotomy that seeks to cast reasonable human empathy as black-hearted conspiracy in a repulsively and unjustifiably self-righteous fashion.
You have no conception of just how very glad I am of that fact.
That should be ‘@ 106’ in my last post.
ra@74: The thread has moved on since I was last here, but just to follow up…I didn’t mean to say that officials in Nice were to blame for not anticipating this event and having a plan for it, only that now that it’s happened, I would want an analysis to see if there are any strategies that could reduce casualties and deaths, including things like making it hard for a truck to get onto the area where the pedestrians were and considering whether it would be reasonable to have more first responders in the area. (I have no idea whether it would be or not, but I’d say that this sort of thing ought to be treated a bit like an airplane crash and all potential angles for preventing it/reducing the severity in the future ought to be explored, not just extending the state of emergency which, at best, is only going to be partially helpful.)