“I knew there’d be trouble when we hired that moslem seat designer”
“Yeah, but that christian guy’s designs were just too dam’ crossy”
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Anti-sithite.
The stupid… it hurts and is funny at the same time.
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Ah, I see, didn’t realize that, thanks for that info.
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Aw, gosh darn it.
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For the most part all extremists are small but vocal minorities, it’s just that highly partisan media outlets have managed to trick people into thinking they support political stances that they really don’t. It’s not just the reactionaries, but the reactionaries are far “better” at it than the left because they’ve absolutely mastered the ability to manipulate people’s fears and amplify them and fear-driven people tend to lean right anyway.
An unfortunate side effect of this is that those small, vocal minorities that weren’t ever going to do anything but write angry treatises and argue with people on the Internet, eventually start attracting people who are certifiably ill, and who will, with a little provocation, do terrible things.
That’s where people like Breivik and Roof come from. Deeply troubled, socially withdrawn people are drawn to extremist ideologies like moths to a flame, and in many cases, the people peddling those ideologies know that. It’s the exact same strategy used by evil bastards the world over, from cult leaders to the taliban.
The problem has always been there, it’s just that it’s different now than it was 30 years ago. The guy who poisoned Tylenol bottles, for example, nobody knows who it was, or why they did it, it was a random act of violence likely motivated by a confabulated internal narrative. Maybe the killer thought the company had hurt him, maybe he thought it was hurting other people, we’ll never really know.
What has changed is the fact that the Internet now makes it easy for those evil bastards to connect with the unwell people that they plan to use as pawns, and that accessibility not only accounts for the increase in overtly politically/racially based violence, but also the general increase in frequency and visibility. Extremist “causes” that would have otherwise languished in obscurity are now just a Google search away, the exhausting speed of the news cycle means that more people hear about the things done in the name of those causes, both of which combine to create a false image of the size of the groups behind them.
Hell, even just me sitting here explaining this is part of the problem. There’s always a chance that someone will read this, and it will make them feel a little uncomfortable because it hits a little too close to home. Their reaction might be honest self-evaluation, or it might be to shut it out and say, “well they are just a left wing pontificator who thinks I’m an idiot and wants to hurt me!” That might be all it takes to send someone who might have been thinking about seeing someone about their problems spiraling down into a psychological hole they may never get out of–not because I said anything particularly offensive, but because it was just the push they needed to decide that the world is out to get them.
Once the racing conspiracy thought process starts, it’s pretty hard for anyone to stop.
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People who are easily spooked will often see what they fear.
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I was scared because I thought they were Dementors.
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Anyone speak Norwegian well enough to confirm this isn’t just a joke?
Welll… somebody (and I’m not saying who) decided to replace text characters with a blurry jpeg. And so a simple export into google translate becomesmore onerous.
And this whole misunderstanding could have been eliminated, if someone had used a proper camera (AND FOCUSED IT).
People just don’t care any more. I mean, look at this shit. (from a recent Trump mini scandal.)
What possible purpose is there for including a blurry collar and a blurry hairline?
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Man, I don’t know what’s going on this image, but it looks hot and sticky.
There have certainly been Islamic terror attacks and attempts in Norway over the years, but I think the Islamophobia is a product of something different.
The Pakistani community in Norway has grown quite rapidly in just a few years. While the immigrants mainly came in as uneducated guest workers from rural areas, many in the second generation have become professionals (bankers, lawyers, doctors), a real testament to the power of universal free quality education in promoting social mobility. However, there remains a relatively large community of very traditional, very religious, relatively poor Muslim immigrants which is quite visible in Oslo, where the population is concentrated. (Even more recently there has also been an influx of Somali and Iraqi immigrants, mainly Muslim.)
It is all so recent that it is jarring for some Norwegians, as the country was incredibly homogeneous through most of its history. Also, the temperament of some of the Imams is not characteristically Norwegian; when I was living in Oslo there were a few rather angry demonstrations, and the news coverage of such things might be the main image people outside of the cities have with that community.
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It could be worse than a terrorist. It could be a Catholic nun.
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Looks like after he was discovered, he was made to stay in place for the pics (more than one out there). Added insult to injury.
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And here I thought that was just a good picture for misleading thumbnails.
Yeah, invisible terrorists are going to make it hard to See Something, Say Something.
The undead supremacists are the worst.
Criminy, I’m batting 0.000 today – all I see are 16 circles.
(Unicorn chaser, of a sort. Immigrant Somali bus driver in Denmark, who couldn’t get his birthday off due to scheduling probs, gets a happy b’day surprise.
HT to BoingBoing a couple of years ago IIRC)
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BTW, unrelated but from today’s Aftenposten (vie Google Translate):
(I think the second word is supposed to be “procrastination”…)
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Not nearly as likely. we don’t have as prolific public transportation.
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