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(for clarity, this is admin-me speaking)
And that's where the questions about Westminster came up: what is acceptable? Technology has enabled more and more live reporting. We're really in an age where technology has been allowed to expand and develop without real questions being asked about how it affects us as a species.
Technology facilitates live reporting of sensitive scenes that some think overstep the line of decency. Technology facilitates scams online as per the recent Ebay thread. Technology allows for far easier communications between members of terrorist organisations. Technology and porn and sexual extortion as reported yesterday. Technology and fake news. At some point we need to judge whether it's tipped too far in favour of technology to the detriment of humanity.
I've spent a bit of time trying to understand the modern issue of Islamic extremism. Unlike Drew and others here, I don't think it's a Muslim problem as most Muslims condemn such acts and are decent people. I think it's a human problem, manifesting in some of the cultures, where Islam happens to be the dominant religion, which have survived through European colonialism and the expansion of western ideas. All humans everywhere feel that their culture is normal and decent, and where other cultures' attitudes and beliefs differ from your own, those differences are wrong or even evil. This naturally leads to conflict, and that's evident through all of history. We also have the idea that whatever society we've grown up in is naturally right, or at least heading in the right direction. So we have an innate sense of our own superiority when faced with people who don't think like us.
We have to remember that less than 500 years ago we had in this country an absolute ruler who could get away with executing his own wives just because they didn't give him a male heir. Less than 200 years ago, even as our nation was experimenting with democracy they were shipping millions of human slaves to terrible lives in the Americas. 70 years ago Britain was still in control of 360 million Indians, and there are plenty who believe that atrocities were committed there. Britain drew the map of the modern middle east and central Asia to deliberately weaken the existing societies there over two hundred years. Britain deliberately hooked 40 million Chinese citizens on heroin and then *went to war* with China when their government tried to help their own citizens by banning it.
I don't present these historical facts as excuses for terrorist acts today, or moral relativism, or even liberal apologist hand-wringing. I cannot stress that enough! I present them as examples that humans everywhere can do terrible things, while believing that they are on the side of right/ justice/ god/ Allah.
We in the west believe, broadly speaking, in Liberalism and Capitalism, Socialism, Humanism, Human Rights etc to greater or lesser degrees. We believe in the value of individual human lives and of the need to protect our children. These beliefs form an ideology, essentially a collection of made up ideas about how the world should be. We don't believe we bear responsibility for how our fore-bearers shaped the world, we don't believe our children should be targets for attack. Unfortunately our beliefs are an arbitrary collection of shared ideas and there's nothing that says other people need to share them. They are also, in the grand scheme of human history, an all too recent invention.
So to me it's no real surprise that there are still other ideologies out there that would be completely at odds with it. And as much as we try, we won't be able to understand their way of thinking because it is literally evil to us. The hard part is in understanding that to these terrorist monsters it may seem necessary, to combat the global hegemony which is our culture, aspects of which to them seem exactly as evil - for example, the renouncing of god and religious teachings as a central pillar of our world view, our love of wealth, the way we can so easily divorce our own lives from the things our governments and economies do abroad in far off places...
I'm not going to pretend I understand it. I just think humans are at heart an aggressive, tribal species and this current conflict is just another reflection of that, whatever you think about the link between terrorists, mentally ill people and Islam as a concept...
Anyway, sorry for the ramble. As said up there, it's a tragedy and I'm very sad about it.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
I remember band aid and news reports yes, thank fuck all the billions it's raised over the years has stopped the issues in Africa, all the corrupt officials have gone and every penny now goes in to helping those in need, not that there any left because we've donated billions for decades so now it's all sorted.
The reports breed fear, they do, and it's wrong, what happened is terrible and disgusting yes, but we should not fear going to public events because as soon we do we've lost.
Nor should we fear the local Islamic family that run the takeaway in town, or the Asian kids who are in school with our children, because that's what Isis want, they want us to hate every Muslim because then they have the numbers to really fight a war.
However, to debate a general response to terrorism and such like, I think this should be done in a separate thread.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
I think you just scanned and saw that part of my post and got the context wrong.
I guess a lot lot of people are saying a lot of similar things but meaning it all over the Internet right now.
I instantly assumed you had the wrong end of the stick.
We is cool.
Tech is often a gateway to good or bad. We just need to be educated well enough to understand what is right and what is wrong and to know where the mark of decency is.
Criminal abuse of tech is clearly wrong and should be punished accordingly.
Other abuse is morally wrong, but society has to self police that.
I wonder how many times the explosion video has been clicked. The press are not at fault for making it available, we are at fault for consuming it.
Maybe, we've seen so much now that, really it doesn't matter and actually no one really cares beyond those directly affected.
I am not for a moment laying the blame at their feet, but I am saying that I think they will be better placed to spot it as it arises. I think there is more that senior Imams and community leaders could be doing, and supported to do.
I think the absence of messages of condolence from large Muslim nations is very conspicuous.
99% of Muslims no doubt abhor extremism: stand up and be seen to fight it. Otherwise you will be victimised by knee jerk reactions of ignorant angry people.
We need to fight this stuff hand in hand, all of us, whatever we believe in.
Absolutely gutted reading snippets of the scenes from last night. Grim.
Ignore him. He's just wearing his fake anger on his sleeve again.
I saw some footage last night from inside the stadium as we were online when the news broke, back when there was confusion if it was even a bomb or not. I haven't rewatched anything or seen further videos this morning through choice.
You can't stop the footage being uploaded these days by people who are there. So are we saying the media should have to ignore footage uploaded by eyewitnesses? It'll exist on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube anyway. People are filming things all the time and most have an internet connection so could upload instantly.
Traditional media is slow these days, the story can unfold in real time on social media and that's not going to change if we further censor the media.
My wife is utterly terrified and refuses to book holidays anywhere "too crowded". That doesn't leave many options does it?
Otherwise it'll be the Mormons.
Again...
No it hasn't stopped the suffering in Africa: that wasn't my point. You hate terrorist news broadcasts because it sensationalises suffering. I'm asking why reporting famine with images of starving children is any different. Let's try cancer kids in Great Ormond Street hospital on some BBC medical behind the scenes show. Where do you draw the line?
I'm saying that people don't fear going to public events despite recent events in France and here. I don't think the reports breed fear.
What some areas of the media do with their reporting is to give fuckheads some justification to express the prejudicial bullshit they believed way beforehand. Jokes about sand niggers and ragheads were going about way before two planes hit a major US financial district.
Have a gander at some Google searches restricting the term "Muslim terrorists" to 1995 to 2000 ie. pre-9/11. It's quite revealing. Something like this article would sound like the epitome of right-on Guardian thinkspeak. Instead it's from that well-known liberal mouthpiece the Christian Science Monitor (sarcasm intentional on my part).