OK - an 8 year old is dead. My daughter is 8, and loves Ariana Grande.
Fuck me. What a sad state of affairs.
Why can’t we run the world like healthy people?
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I’m not sure about that - immediately after the show, a dense crowd would have been passing through the foyer.
This one has really upset me. Specifically targetting children is a new development; the mind recoils. I know my gf’s goddaughter wasn’t there, but there’s every chance that she knows someone who was. Selfishly, the Arena is my nearest big venue - I was there just a fortnight ago and have tickets for another concert there next week. If the bomber had been on a different timetable, this could have been me.
Sorry to call people out, but the only place I’ve encountered conspiracy theories and speculation about political opportunitism is right here in this BB thread. Far, far too soon, folks. Children have died; a little more empathy would be appropriate.
ETA: This is displaying as a reply to Mister44, but I wasn’t directing any criticism that way!
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Because we have a system that runs on our collective dysfunction?
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Indeed. Instead we have powerful sociopaths and powerless sociopaths enabling each-other in turn and invoking different flavours of the same Invisible Bearded Sky Man™. I’m thankful that more kids don’t get caught in that crossfire.
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Generally the antidote to this stuff is doing real police work. Bad shit happens when governments take shortcuts in that regard.
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They have. They’re just in places like Yemen and Syria, rather than in the west. So lots of people tend to forget about them.
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No doubt. I definitely consider the War Between the Arseholes to be a global one.
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There were some long running terror campaigns in Britain in the past. I would venture to guess the IRA had done far more nastiness for a far longer time than I-S nutjobs. Unfortunately, the UK is a country which has a lot of experience in dealing with this sort of thing.
The problem is that previous waves were somehow less indiscriminate, at least in UK. The IRA mostly targeted police and army, explicitly trying to minimise civilian casualties.
The current wave is more like the '70s bullshit we had in Italy, very indiscriminate “nobody is safe” style. This said, targeting a concert full of teenagers is downright cruel, similar to what happened in Nice. The blame game has already started (“security was lax!” etc etc) but we all know anybody can step into a pub on a Friday night and get a similar massacre going, there is nothing you can do about it when the attacker is already there.
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Hmmm. I guess that having been born in the UK and lived all my life here, I’m unqualified to enter this particular minefield. 
Yes, it’s true that the Conservatives have stronger links with the security services than the Labour party. But then again, the Labour party have closer links with the Trades Unions than the Conservative party. I’m not wholly sure where that argument gets us (other than noting that both sorts of organisations are good at dirty tricks…)
I’m not suggesting that there isn’t something odd going on here - certainly (as you noted) the fact that they arrested someone pretty much straight away does imply that there was a watch operation already underway. And a lot of folk have been picked up in the UK in the last year or so allegedly for planning things.
I just worry that even suggestions like “prodding to take them over the edge” provides fuel for the fire. Even though it’s clearly possible (I mean, it’s not as though there aren’t precedents like Timothy McVeigh etc.)
Meanwhile, the upsetting part for me is how the hate-spreaders have so far chosen to spend a day that the politicians have stepped aside from campaigning in to spread their own continual litany of lies and fear-mongering. Whereas those of us who are actually real people have been more concerned with the victims. Hey ho.
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It happens multiple times every year in the West, but I doubt quoting facts will matter much. Hell, the most recent terror attack in the united states was by a Christian white supremacist.
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Apparently some police work was done, but not quite enough of it.
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If 20+ people had been killed in a tube crash this week there would be lots of concern over the victims.
There would also be an inquiry about how it happened and whether the chance of it happening again could be reduced.
We’re now being told that the bomber was known to security services (caveat: unidentified sources) but that they did not see him as a threat. That would be a good starting point for inquiry.
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We’re now being told that the bomber was known to security services (caveat: unidentified sources) but that they did not see him as a threat.
That all depends on the signal-to-noise ration. The number of people “known” to security services in the UK can easily be in the tens of thousands. It is not feasible to keep all of them under constant surveillance for a mere suspicion that they might be up to something.
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But that’s exactly where police-management skills come into the picture: you have to be good at judging who is likely to go off. In this case, someone wasn’t good at it, or at least not good enough. I’m not saying whoever it was should be fired, but maybe his dossiers should be passed on to someone else. Nobody is perfect and all that, but when you have dead children, you’ve got to step up your game.
It doesn’t matter anyway, I expect this will be turned yet again into an argument for internet dragnets - the closing paragraphs insisting on “how he learnt to make bombs” points right to that.
Manchester and the surrounding area will be dealing with a whole lot of grief for the foreseeable future. Just one child dying an accidental death can be enough to rock a community, I can’t begin to imagine how painful this is going to be for the parents of the injured and the dead, the injured kids and anyone who witnessed this horror.
Targeting children is a new, cowardly low. [Edit: Apparently, I should’ve clarified this line with the caveat “for IS wannabes”. Way to attack the least important part of my comment, folks. You should all be very proud of your pedantry.]
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Again, that depends on the number of suspicious cases. If the number of suspects is high enough and the threat signs are weak, there is no way to consistently correctly judge every single one. And reprimanding those in charge of the file would have the perverse effect of disincentivizing growth of the database.
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The IRA’s campaign in London during the 80’s was quite indiscriminate. It involved bombs in shopping malls, in garbage cans on the streets and other public places. It is one of the reasons you can’t find a trash can around when you need one there.
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“THE STOCKHOLM truck terrorist deliberately drove into the path of innocent children when he mowed down pedestrians on a busy street, according to a witness.”
At Nice:
o_0 I’d have to have a mighty big chip on my should to interpret that as criticism. Fair point that a busy foyer is dense with people. Now that I think about it, it would probably be worse than an open area, even if all the seats are full around it, because the walls would possibly reflect shock-waves and shrapnel.
It’s a sad deal we have to even deal with this shit. Its even sadder that is just compounds the hate the targets have, which often leads to bad decisions making things worse and increasing the bad things that cause terrorism in the first place.
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