100 dead in the Bataclan apparently.
100 dead in the Bataclan apparently.
Hundred dead at the concert. Gear up, France.
I presume that'll be deleted too. But say what you like, our Hazza is a tryer.
100 dead is absolutely horrifying.
Not sure if that's real or not. I presume not though as there hasn't been a word on the news about it.Originally Posted by Lewis
I would normally moan about it, but there is something kind of lol about Harold having his posts deleted.
Even Spoons post where he quoted him too. Quite blanket.
I had read that the Calais fire thing is not real. BBC just mentioned it now for the first time, but said it was "reports" from social media.
Fuck you Henry.
100 is a bloody lot. Hard to imagine a worse death than that, waiting in fear while they shoot people one-by-one only to get blown up at the last. This seems pretty unprecedented in its scope and coordination, doesn't it? Usually the big death tolls come from one-off explosions or plane hijackings.
118 dead in that club alone. Dread to think what number we're going to wake up to in the morning.
140 being mentioned now.
This is fucking mental but at the same time I'm surprised so few (comparatively) people have been killed in other recent attacks.
On the other hand, my friend is still alive.
My cousin is in Paris with a group at the minute. Thankfully they made it back to their hotel safely.
The death toll from that concert is sickening.
Someone from the hotel that my mum/aunts/friends were hiding in called his relative, who came (presumably) with a van and brought them all back to their apartment.
They're now going to get absolutely wasted and try to sleep.
Shocking to the system.
I think the manner of these things stick rather than the actual kill count. Maybe I'm too historically-minded (lol) and see things being blown up as more normal (even acceptable) than labour-intensive shooting galleries. Similarly, numbers are pretty hard to grasp once they get past a couple and become impersonal. I always think the leap from five dead to thirty dead is a lot more 'shocking' than thirty to a hundred and thirty, at which point it is just more of a massacre rather than a mere incident.
The coordination also makes it seem a lot worse to me. One nutter, or group of such, is always at some level easier to understand than something like this. This just seems like warfare.
I'm more worried that what started as groups of men in cars and whatnot, ended in just two dead terrorists. Oh, plus the two suicides.
I think we notice the number of digits in a death count, and each extra digit is almost the "same" degree of shockingness. Human brains tend to process numbers logarithmically - it's the only way we can deal with very large numbers.
Makes you wonder if we'd have been a more peaceful society in base 2 rather than base 10.
I'm a little bit staggered that they let the football match play out, rather than calling it off. Although on thinking about it after the fact, it may be that they didn't fancy 60,000 people out on the streets in a panic straight away.
That would make sense. Is there any reason to believe that at a certain point it just becomes meaningless?
I don't know, to be honest. I could make an argument that there would be a drop-off after six or seven people, and that most people would stop being "more" shocked after six or seven digits of death count (above which it just gets bracketed into "unthinkingly horrifying"). This would be based on the fact that humans can only process individual numbers instantaneously up to six or seven (everything above that kind of gets sorted as "many; 10ish", or "many; 100ish", etc.).
That's all spit-balling based on very loose hypothesis though, so don't read too much into that. But the fact that we process large numbers logarithmically is solidly established.
I think once it reaches a number where people become unable to picture that many people or relate it to something, then it pretty much becomes meaningless.
Up to 10s of thousands people can relate it to a football stadium or whatever. Once you start getting into 100s of thousands or millions it becomes very difficult to do that and people can't really comprehend it.
We had to do some stuff on communicating risk to patients and this was how it came across, at least.
I saw this on the TV over someone's shoulder in a pub (140 dead by this point) and my first reaction was oh no, this one's the end. People simply aren't going to tolerate any form of Islamism anymore and if they want to, unfortunately they'll have to be made not to.
So, just woke up. This is a bit mental isn't it?
I always wondered why no one had been successful in Europe with Mumbai-style attacks. Well, now they have.
People have been "tolerating" violent Islamism?
Yeah, just woke up... This is mental.
Spent most of the night in work just watching BBC news in disbelief and trying to ignore customers. This is mental.
Was it the Bataclan where 100+ ended up dead? What happened there? Did they blow it up when the police/army/whoever started coming in?
Feels a bit like this sums it all up as well:
Why do we (the west) keep cosying up to the biggest promoters of this shite?
Concert hall filled with 1000-1500 people. They come in at the back of the crowd and just open fire. Place was packed so people weren't realizing what was happening, and even when they did, escape routes weren't exactly easily accessible.
Oh, and they blew themselves up when police came in.
Was that the same place they were killing people one by one as well?
Yeah, Bataclan.
And last time they cut into BBC1's feed was probably Stockwell or Michael Jackson's death. Y'know, the stuff that matters to more or is closer to home. Next time they do it will be for the Queen's death.
Wow. I think as Spoon said if it turns out they are home grown which is increasingly likely...
Why always France? I know there's a large muslim population and there's a lot of history that goes with that but you could make the same argument about the UK. Is our security just better? I mean the French are no mugs, are they?
Things such as banning face covering (for example, burqa's) probably plays a part.
The French Muslims tend to come from the Maghreb countries with a greater tendency toward Islamist violence. Bangladeshis don't have quite the same history, and even Pakistanis don't seem as bad.
There's also the fact that the Parisian Banlieus are the perfect melding pot for terrorists. Low-income Muslim families in public housing, segregated from central Paris and surrounded by others who are similar; the alienation is in-built. It's where the Charlie Hebdo brothers were radicalized and I'd place money on at least some of these guys coming from the suburbs as well.
Yeah, sorry, all that is what I meant by 'history'. But there's segregation here and the Pakistanis are pretty shit. I just wondered of there's something about Paris in particilar which makes it an easy target.
Having (open) land borders probably makes it lot easier to get hold of things like automatic weapons.
Sorry, what?
But yeah, good call on Saudi Arabia.
You would think it won't be that long until somebody decides it's ground war time in Syria. They've just blown a Russian plane up and now this. The Russians in particular, right or wrong, aren't likely to fuck about.
Britain panders to them a bit more by trying to be ridiculously PC about most of their crap.
What would the war aim be? As unpalatable as it is, the only realistic one is probably to back Assad (presumably with concessions from him) which is what the Russians are doing.
What is it now? Everybody knows that chucking a few bombs on Raqqa won't end IS. A properly co-ordinated ground war (with a real plan for what happens afterwards) would work far better and I'd be amazed if there aren't contingency plans for that eventuality already. I think you are correct in that to make it as clean and quick as possible it would have to happen alongside Assad. I dunno, it's a shit option but then they all seem a bit shit at the minute.
Fuck knows. I don't think TPTB give much of a shit about ISIS, despite the rhetoric.
The Russians are already on the ground in Syria.
As for "the West" not knowing that Saudi Arabia is the source of all the problems - firstly, that's horrendously naive (everyone and their dog loves a good meddle in the ME) and secondly, they know perfectly well where all of the trouble comes from. They just think putting up with Saudi Arabia's support for nutjobbery is worth the cost. Who else can "the West" side with in the Middle East? Iraq's a failed state, Iran's spent 30 years preaching Death to America, Syria is Israel's main enemy, Jordan's got all the political clout of Belgium and the Gulf States are minnows. They prop up Saudi Arabia because there's nobody else.
I agree with that; if they did they'd already have gone in. Much better a couple of hundred dead Parisians now and then than for any of OUR BOYS to be captured and beheaded on a live stream with the government being blamed.
And the Americans and Brits were on the ground long before any bombing. I meant a ground invasion with proper numbers.
Who is saying the West doesn't know the part the Saudis play in all this? Have I missed a post?
You forget - there already was a "ground invasion with proper numbers". It was called the Iraq war, and when it started there was no such thing as ISIS.
Why do you think that a repetition is going to improve anything?
I don't forget and I understand the genesis of IS. I wasn't talking about a repeat performance which is why I wrote of a proper post-war plan. It can be done; the Americans managed it in Japan. Unfortunately I doubt any major power would be willing to put the effort into the infrastructural and social support which would be necessary.
All options are shit; keep bombing with no impact and innocents dead, support Assad which might kill IS and will result in different innocents dead, or invade without a plan for afterwards which will leave us back where we are now within the decade. It would be nice to think the different sides will just talk to one another (they will eventually, it always ends that way) but we are a million miles away from that scenario now.
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