point taken.

And, since the victims of terrorism count just the same whether they're European or, in this case, Pakistani, Je Suis Lahore.

So damn tired of this horror show.

Absolutely the country is irrelevent. Still an attrocious act.

That pic is great!
Let's not forget the rest of the world despite we know mostly only people in Paris and Bruxelles.

Indeed so.

It's faits divers, is what it is! (I'd like to be good person and let him live that down, but... I guess I'm more of a sort-of-okay person.)

I'd dare estimate that the mitraillettes claim more victims than the fusils d'assaut in Belgium. They are our deadliest predators. Fried for the kill. Killing you slowly, crunchily, deliciously. The Better Way to Go™.

Tangentially: did anyone ever finish a mitraillette on their own? I've always shared with others because neither of us would be able to gulf that down on our lonesome (also, sharing is caring, especially when clotting your arteries). It's not like I have the ambition to, but I'm open to the idea that I'm "doing it wrong."

OK, so I typed a long post about this earlier today. Then accidentally deleted it before posting. Then decided it was probably just as well I didn't post it, since it got too far into politics (and UK politics, which is probably of no interest to most of you...)

I'd been meaning to make some mention of the Pulse club shootings in Orlando. Then, as I was travelling back from France to the UK yesterday, another attack hit much closer to home. Not a mass-casualty event, this time. And not carried out by Daesh or an Islamist extremist. A far-right 'Britain First' nutcase assassinated Labour MP Jo Cox barely six miles from where I was at the time (I travel via Leeds Bradford Airport and Leeds Train Station).

A politically-inspired assassination of a sitting MP is not something that happens here. It just doesn't. I'm still sort of stunned.

My original attempt at a post apportioned some blame to specific persons. I won't name them here, and I'm sort of glad that post evaporated. I will just say that the EU Referendum campaign has unleashed some very ugly stuff.

We have been living in a dream of a false sense of safety and are unfortunately slowly waking up to reality.

Mad people who just kill who is not aligned with their beliefs.
Not to the point reached 75 years ago, fortunately. But more education about History wouldn't hurt.

I don't agree. Statistically, this is the safest time to be a human, literally ever. Violence is on a long-term global decline. Mad acts like these are shocking in part because they're so rare these days. As a random historical comparison, in ancient Rome, the assassination of a politician was so commonplace as to be shrug-worthy. For a while, even Emperors had a life expectancy measured in months.

(And when I said such things don't happen here, I should have specified "since the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland". The IRA did quite a bit of MP-murdering back in the day.)

It is actually the sense of threat engendered by these atrocities that is false. A net of nightmares we weave for ourselves because we evolved in a time when danger was ever-present and paranoia was a survival trait.

Of course, it's still important that we do what we can to prevent them from happening at all. That should probably include toning down political rhetoric.

Death rate is still 100% for our species last I checked.

...and now Bagdad.
When the approaching end of Ramadan brings a merry atmosphere.

Yeah D: The news too often talk about Europe's need to deal with terrorism together, but it's really a global issue. Turkey, Bagdad... This is horrble.

We've actually missed a whole heck of a lot.

It's actually gotten to the point that acknowledging any particular terrorist atrocity feels somehow disrespectful to the victims of the other eleventy-million that have happened recently that we didn't even hear about. I'm not saying we should shut up about it, just that it feels a bit... I don't know. Self-indulgent, maybe? Perhaps it's just compassion fatigue.

And I don't think it's even a solvable problem. You can't make people stop believing in terrorism as a justifiable tool of political or religious leverage, or believing in - let's say 'ideologies' - that justify such acts. Especially not by using violence against them. And yet the terrorists do need to be stopped, and that probably requires killing them. And yet, killing them just convinces the rest (both other terrorists and potential sympathisers) that we are the evil ones and they are right. Blowing the heck out of half a dozen bad guys, while at the same time inspiring a hundred more to take up arms against you, is not a winning strategy. But neither is letting those half-dozen bad guys live so they can continue to murder others.

I mean, of course improving the economic prospects of young people in the Middle East and feeding them a steady diet of liberal pop-culture will eventually break the influence of psychotic extremism. But it took us Europeans centuries to (mostly) get over our psycho-religious-extremism phase. Can we really afford to wait until Daesh is only as obnoxious as the Westboro Baptist Church?

Indeed, it is not a war against us, it is madness against anyone notadhering to their mad vision - starting from the closest ones in Syria and Irak.

Problem is solvable. People get tired of killing, always. Unfortunately, it will take time and menwhile more innocent will die.

This was not the news I wanted to wake up to this morning.

D:
My thoughts are with France.

That's pretty much how I felt when I first heard the news as it was breaking last night

Why can't people just be nicer to each other?

Surely life is just SO much easier that way...

Or at least have a safeword...

It looks to me like a desperate man committing suicide, and adding a cause to it.

Suicide does not solve your problem, it only transfer it to others. This time, many others...

I only hope that such actions will not stop us to live the lives we want, no matter the new risks.
If not, they would have won.

Well, for a while it seemed like that might be a plausible explanation. But the investigators are now saying Bouhlel and several associates had been planning this attack for months. There seems to be little doubt now that it was (yet another) Daesh-inspired Islamist terrorist attack.

And now it's Munich.

I just realized that every year, 60,000 persons die in France from tobacco.
Who is the real ennemy?

Well, of course you're right. But where do we draw the line between sensibly putting things in perspective and mere whataboutism? People choose to smoke. They do not choose to be shot or blown up by terrorists. In many places in Europe, we seem to have collectively decided that it is not acceptable to inflict your tobacco smoke on others. We attempt to reduce the risk as much as possible. So comparing terrorism to tobacco is not a good argument for not doing anything about terrorism.

As I said back in June, even with all these terrorist attacks, humans in most of the world are still much less likely to die by violence than at any time in history. The Middle East and North Africa are the only parts of the planet where the overall trend of declining violence is not happening. Violence there has been increasing over the past few years. There is doubtless a complex, interdependent set of reasons for that. And people will doubtless focus on the one reason among many that fits their cognitive, philosophical, religious and political biases and ignore the rest. Some will blame Bush, Cheney and Blair. Others will blame Mohammed, Al-Ghazali and Al-Wahhab.