European Terrorism

Terrible stuff, thank you to all police who keep us safe and have to go face danger for us.

Rip to the brave guy that died.

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Absolutely horrible for those affected, we are very lucky in this country that our security forces are very good at preventing this kind of thing when you look at the incidents France and Germany have had to cope with in these last years.

This is the most severe incident since 2005, and it certainly won’t go down as a very successful attack.

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Any attack whereby someone is mown down and killed in full view on one of London’s landmark bridges is a successful terror attack, in the eyes of these evil people.

I dare say there were numerous pictures uploaded to Twitter within minutes of the event, being shared or retweeted. It’s so morbid.

On the one hand yes, but they will undoubtedly have been looking for much higher casualties. They were perhaps even seeking to attack Parliament in session, and in those they failed spectacularly.

He’s the terrorist.

If the Press are going to ignore the request to keep the identity under wraps, it would at least help if they named the right person ffs

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I see the obligatory Union flags are turning up on Facebook profiles.
A bit ironic when you see the list of casualties and nations they come from.

Great touch :clap::slightly_smiling_face:

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Really horrible thing to do, I know, but to put various forms of “terrorism” into perspective: There are several articles on the London incident on the front page of the NYT. Today, American bombers killed an estimated 230 civilians in Mosul (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/us-air-strikes-mosul-230-civilians-killed-dead-isis-held-iraq-battle-islamic-state-a7646011.html) and not a single mention of that by the same newspaper.
Surely, this deserves a bit of an outcry as well? Won’t be happening though, the victims in Iraq are a wee bit too brown and the bombs were sent with good intentions. /shrug

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I wouldn’t disagree with your point in any way ethically, but the answer to it is not due to any ill thoughts on behalf of western newspaper editors, but rather the rather sad truth that the readership of said western newspapers is at the same time both ignorant and overexposed to incidents of large scale civilian deaths in war torn countries.

Like a ‘saturation point’ has been reached and news of a car bomb going off in Iraq or Syria no longer holds the shock value to be newsworthy to the audience. Incase anyone wants to shout at me over the internet :grimacing: , i’m not saying I agree with what I’ve just said, but it’s still pretty much true i’m afraid :confused:

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Unfortunately, this is not true. If you’re really interested, there is a book that - on the basis of careful scientific analysis - compares the choice of topics and wording of articles in the mainstream media on crimes of the West (and its allies) to those of perceived enemies. It is called “Manufacturing Consent” (https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490301371&sr=8-1&keywords=manufacturing+consent) and should be mandatory reading in every study course on journalism, political science and so on.

Screenshot from my copy. In western mainstream media, there are topics you can “do” and some you “can’t do”, no censorship needed. And you can easily proof that (as in done in the book, for example). Among all the scandals of the Trump era, how much coverage did the failed raid in Yemen get?


This article doesn’t even bother to list the number of people killed. Just look at the wording, it’s staggering:
"The death of Chief Petty Officer William Owens came after a chain of mishaps and misjudgments that plunged the elite commandos into a ferocious 50-minute firefight that also left three others wounded and a $75 million aircraft deliberately destroyed. There are allegations — which the Pentagon acknowledged on Wednesday night are most likely correct — that the mission also killed several civilians, including some children. "

  1. Death of “hero” American soldier 2. Wounding of three more soldier 3. Loss of an aircraft, including price of said aircraft 4. “Several” Civilian deaths (who’s counting, right?), among them “some” (!!!) children.

Do you think that if children died in a terror attack somewhere in our sphere, the NYT would talk of “some” children and even fail to list the correct number? The US is not at war with Yemen officially, so this is actually a major war crime. Can you imagine the Western Media suggesting going after those responsible? In this case we already know the answer, this has happened in January and nobody has called for anything. The perpetrators will face no justice whatsoever, just as those who killed 230 civilians today won’t. Can you even imagine our public letting people get away with that if something like that happened over here?
Reporting like this is absolutely no coincidence and it has very little to do with oversaturation.

Another quick example: How many people probably know Billy Clinton for getting blown by Monica Lewinsky? Or for being an enthusiastic saxophone player? How many know him for presiding over the sanctions against Iraq that killed half a million people? This is not because half a million deaths don’t cut it anymore. It is because there has never been daily reporting along the lines of "We’re killing civilians by the thousands and this is the man responsible [insert picture of jolly old Bill].

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I take most of your points on media bias, that’s what I alluded to with the ‘ignorant’ part. I don’t think i was really arguing that in my previous post. I do maintain though that shock news saturation has a part to play in this. They’re prioritising the stories that sell copies to a certain readership within the UK market, it doesn’t always have to be a deep seated conspiracy to hide away news happening on the other side of the world.

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My post wasn’t meant to “challenge” you in some way, I hope it didn’t come across that way.
It’s not a conspiracy. That is crucially important. Publishers simply have interests of both political and economic nature.
To give you an example: I once did an internship at a small newspaper via my university, and at one point me and the rest of my class had the opportunity to ask the editor-in-chief some questions. I asked him about the political alignment of the paper and how this translated into everyday work. In other words, how “the word” was passed down.
He got a bit sweaty, said is was a conservative paper (CDU) and that reporters were basically free to report on whatever they wanted, unless on certain topics.

One of those topics was the speed limit. He knew that the group of owners was staunchly against the implementation of a speed limit on the Autobahn and any article disagreeing with that would not make it into the paper. [A speed limit would reduce CO² emissions by 10%, would lower the cost of crash damage and most importantly, would reduce the number of annual casualties by an estimated 20%. Still not popular in Germany, because of close ties between massive car manufacturing industry, politics and press.]
This is just one example of one topic at a small paper. The bigger the paper, the closer the ties to political and economic power. At a paper like the Times, you don’t piss off the big companies that secure your job via advertising money. You don’t (really) antagonize politicians (unless they’re Corbyn), because it might backfire. If you want to publish articles that state “Hey, we’re commiting war crimes. All the time. Please get rid of the president”, there is no way it gets past the editor’s desk in a major newspaper. Not because people don’t want to hear about it. People were interested in Watergate, they were interested in the topic covered in “Spotlight” and they’d be interested in who killed 230 innocent people over what, and who’s responsible.

I for one do not think that the loss of life of one those unfortunate souls on that bridge in London is any more tragic than that of a child murdered by American bombs. Only someone really wicked would rate a person more or less important based on their looks or origin. And any reporting that calls itself “unbiased” would not, either. Accordingly, a paper should sell the same amount of copies whether it reports on a crime in Iraq or one in London or Berlin, or Paris (excluding attacks on home soil, of course). Personally, I’d be even more interested in reporting on crimes committed by my own government, because it is something I’d have a moral obligation to change and can actually influence. I can’t influence the murderers of ISIS.
But that would require a good deal of information that simply is not given.

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Two Metro stations in Russia have been bombed.

10 people reportedly dead with 50 more injured.

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Here we go again.

How is that Europe?

Presumably depends on precisely where the attacks took place (I haven’t seen the news so I don’t know), as I was always under the impression that part of Russia is in Europe and part is in Asia, with the two bits divided by the Ural mountains.

Here ya go, mate. St. Petersburg? European Russia.
http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/europe/eurlarge.htm

“European Russia”. That’s an oxymoron - some geography atlas-jugglers might argue that for geological reasons part of Russia is in Europe, but that’s just horseshit, isn’t it. Russia isn’t Europe culturally, economically or politically and that should be more important than fucking rock formations.
Total pet peeve of mine, but then again I’m firmly in favour of bringing the wall back up and shutting the border down east of Wolfsburg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_states_of_Germany#Culture <— This major error needs to be reversed. :grinning: