Boston marathon bombing

[y66]

I don't know how you say anything right after something like this happens that does not sound stupid or condescending. Cold blooded murder of innocent people is horrifying and impossible to understand or accept. So are stupid overreactions that make things worse.

[jjbrr]

I hope lots of heads rolled at the New York Post. They put on an amazing display of reporting on Monday.

[ggwhiz]

I was once asked by my South African buddy what I thought about Americans as a Canadian and told him that they were often like our loud overbearing cousins and they could say much the same about us (see Pierre Trudeau or Jean Chretien) but at the end of every day we are family.

 

Your many friends are greiving too and inspired by the response knowing we may have to follow that lead someday.

[barmar]

The article just struck me as wrong. When something like this happens, I don't want instructions about how I should feel. Pam (Onoway) didn't take it that way, she took it as suggestions about how to act. Maybe so.

I took it that way, too. It's not "big boys don't cry", it's "come on, get back on the horse and try again". Articles like this are intended as a rallying cry, not a reprimand.

[mycroft]

Bruce Schneier is coming from a security perspective, and from having been saying what he said here for at least 12 years. He coined the term "security theatre" (but he misspelled it :-) for the kind of stuff that gets done to *look* like the government is keeping us safe, but doesn't really.

 

He has had two issues: first the security theatre, because it's expensive and wasteful, but second the fact that there are people whose intent is to make us scared and keep us scared. Some of them are the terrorists; some of them are not. The U.S. put in place a lot of policies that are freedom- and privacy-removing after 2001; and once they're in, they're not coming out even if they "haven't done what they were passed to do", because they're useful to LEO for non-terrorist investigations and "well, it hasn't been needed yet, but it *might* be". All of this; arguably at least one of the invasions; and many other things that tarnish the U.S.'s image worldwide - only possible because they took advantage of people being scared. Arguably, they keep people scared, because it's in the powerful's interest to govern a scared populace; not because it's in the populace's interest to be scared.

 

So, the article is the same thing. Not "you're not allowed to be scared", but "here's why you shouldn't be scared, even though people are trying to make you (that's terrorism for you)" and an implied "other people will take advantage of this to try to keep you scared, for their benefits; don't allow them (again)". I can see how, without context, it might trigger Ken's response. I don't think that was the intent.

 

My condolences to all affected by this attack; especially the injured and those that must care of them. Families and friends of casualties ... are also injured.

[Phil]

Does "don't be terrified" mean the same as 'glib'? :huh:

[TimG]

But if someone is scared, I will not be telling him that he should not be.

Fear is often irrational so that telling someone not be be scared is useless. But, it does not seem wrong to me that there should be calm discussion and examples of calm reactions so that people are less likely to succumb to the irrational fear.

 

My girlfriend's daughter had trouble sleeping Monday night. She was scared, shaking at times. Probably does no good to tell her there is no reason to be scared. But, if she witnesses lots of people reacting calmly to the situation, she may be less affected by such occurrences in the future.

[kenberg]

I certainly favor calmness, and really I, at least sort of, apologize for stirring up an issue here. I didn't, and don't, like the way the article put the matter but it's very possible he, I, and really just about everyone else agree on the general features of a response.

 

Apparently an arrest has been made. Or, on second thought, maybe not! I simply never will understand how a person could do it. Such injuries and death are awful no matter how they occur, but for it to be in such a pointless tragedy is unspeakable.

 

We will of course all go on. I have no idea why the author thinks that I, or we, might not. I'll just accept it as well meant comments, not well received by me. Maybe I'm the weird one, it has been suggested before.

[TimG]

Found this in a Boston Globe article this morning:

At Logan International Airport Tuesday morning, a United Airlines flight to Chicago was brought back to the gate ­after passengers expressed fear over two people speaking a foreign language, said aviation authorities. Passengers and bags were taken off the plane and re-screened, and two people were rebooked on a later flight, said United Airlines spokeswoman Christen David.

This is the sort of fear that, in my opinion, it is entirely appropriate to admonish. This is an embarrassing example of how the terrorists are winning.

 

[mycroft]

Rereading the article, I think there is, and should be, a difference between "don't be scared" and "don't be terrified" - and the latter, both from a passive perspective ("don't be so scared you change your habits to your detriment 'to be safe' ") and an active one ("non illegitimi carborundum") is what Schneier is trying to say. Oh, and my point above that it's not *just* the terrorists who explode stuff who are trying to terrify you.

[barmar]

This morning they held a public, inter-faith memorial ceremony in Boston, which the Obamas participated in. When I heard about this, I got to worrying that someone might perform an attack like this as the preamble to an assassination attempt -- the President is sure to attend a vigil like this, and it will be prepared hastily.

 

But maybe I've just watched too many TV crime dramas with convoluted plots.

[kenberg]

I am pretty sure that it was Bobby Kennedy who said something like "We are all playing Russian Roulette here". Presidents, and their families, are at risk every minute. One of the many reasons that I would not want the job. Not that anyone has ever asked me to take it.

[Cyberyeti]

I am pretty sure that it was Bobby Kennedy who said something like "We are all playing Russian Roulette here". Presidents, and their families, are at risk every minute. One of the many reasons that I would not want the job. Not that anyone has ever asked me to take it.

I liked George Bush Snr's strategy, the fear of two words meant nobody would assassinate him ... President Quayle.

[barmar]

I liked George Bush Snr's strategy, the fear of two words meant nobody would assassinate him ... President Quayle.

Imagine if McCain-Palin had won. They could have retired his Secret Service detail.

 

But.. but... what if the assassins want an idiot in the White House? They elected W, didn't they?

[Scarabin]

Congratulations to the authorities, security services and people of Boston on a great operation. No one could ask for anything better.

[Fluffy]

I haven't followed the news as much as I wanted so don't take me very seriously, but when I hear that the whole city has closed just because of 2 idiots I feel like the terrorist have won.

[kenberg]

I haven't followed the news as much as I wanted so don't take me very seriously, but when I hear that the whole city has closed just because of 2 idiots I feel like the terrorist have won.

 

The short answer to this is that you could ask the people of Boston if they feel that it was worth the inconvenience for the result.

 

A longer answer: There will always be a damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect to dealing with such acts. People died, others lost legs and arms, families have been destroyed. We are supposed to do something about that, Doing something has it's blowback, not the least of which is that it gives a couple of nobodies instanf fame, if fame is the right word. The lyrics from Sprinsteen's Nebraska come to mind:

 

I can't say that

I am sorry

for the things that

we had done

just for a little while sir

me and her we

had us some fun

 

There is evil in this world, it has to be dealt with

[y66]

Posted by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker

 

The incomparable A. J. Liebling wrote once that there are three kinds of journalists: the reporter, who says what he’s seen; the interpretive reporter, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he’s seen; and the expert, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he hasn’t seen. The first two—reporters and interpretive reporters—have been largely undermined by economics and incuriosity. But the third category never stops growing. We are now a nation of experts, with millions of people who know the meaning of everything that they haven’t actually experienced.

 

There are still paradoxes and ironies, surprising heroes and unexpected goats in the new reign. Sometimes the professional experts really are undone by the amateurs. Waking up at six-thirty on Friday morning and hearing what had happened in the night, I followed my own generational instincts, honed on Vietnam and Watergate and the Gulf War, and turned on the television to see the usual stern-jawed “terrorism experts” being stern, scary, and obviously not knowing what the hell they were talking about. Within an hour, with the help of my eighteen-year-old, who insisted on turning from television toward the Web, we had the Tsarnaev brothers’ names, school history, wrestling involvement, vKontakte (Russian Facebook) pages, YouTube videos, and boxing photos.

 

And we already had a glimpse of how this might be a tragedy of assimilation and its discontents. A well-liked student at a good public school, a Golden Gloves boxer—somehow they had transformed their souls in ways that made it possible for them to casually drop devices meant to rip human flesh apart next to an eight-year-old boy and his family. Of course, the pseudo-expertise of the official experts was more than matched by the pseudo-expertise of the amateurs. The night before, the attempt to hang this thing on a poor—and still missing—Indian-American student at Brown, had been crazy, not to mention libelous, not to mention heartbreaking to his family.

 

However the details turn out, this is certainly a tragic story about America far more than it is a tale about the exotic elsewhere. Whatever had happened, it had happened here. Surprises surely await us as we go on, but an intuitive scenario—in which an older brother who had struggled with the promise and disillusion of American life and turned to extremist Islam for comfort, dominated and seduced a younger brother not born or made for violence—seemed plausible. But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism” alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists.

 

And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative. I happened to be in London on 7/7—a far more deadly and frightening terrorist attack—and by 7 P.M. on that horrible day, with the terrorists still at large (they were dead already, but no one knew that) the red double-decker buses were rolling and the traffic was turning and life, though hardly normal, was determinedly going on. The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace.

 

The toxic combination of round-the-clock cable television—does anyone now recall the killer of Gianni Versace, who claimed exactly the same kind of attention then as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did today?—and an already exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism turned a horrible story of maiming and death and cruelty into a national epic of fear. What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.

 

Experts tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen; poets and novelists tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen, either, but have somehow managed to fully imagine. Maybe the literature of terrorism, from Conrad to Updike (and let us not forget Tolstoy, fascinated by the Chechens) can now throw a little light on how apparently likable kids become cold-hearted killers. Acts of imagination are different from acts of projection: one kind terrifies; the other clarifies.

[Scarabin]

I would not criticize the authorities for shutting down Boston, when terrorists strike at the heart of the empire you need quick resolution.

 

The New Yorker excerpt suggests we might find an explanation of the refugee's ingratitude in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

[Mbodell]

This morning they held a public, inter-faith memorial ceremony in Boston, which the Obamas participated in. When I heard about this, I got to worrying that someone might perform an attack like this as the preamble to an assassination attempt -- the President is sure to attend a vigil like this, and it will be prepared hastily.

But maybe I've just watched too many TV crime dramas with convoluted plots.

 

I agree. I thought of it from the very first night, wouldn't this be the type of plot where the assassination of a president is set up by an act like this that basically guarantees that the president will be in Boston to either speak at some service or see some of the wounded or both. Thankfully that sort of fiction is not real life.

 

 

I liked George Bush Snr's strategy, the fear of two words meant nobody would assassinate him ... President Quayle.

 

As much as that was a joke at the time, obviously most of the people who would assissinate a president wouldn't be stopped by a vice president, even one that most people don't respect. It isn't like the people who plan to assassinate a president are rationally choosing the VP over the POTUS (excepting some JFK conspiracy theories).

 

I haven't followed the news as much as I wanted so don't take me very seriously, but when I hear that the whole city has closed just because of 2 idiots I feel like the terrorist have won.

 

Yeah, there was a facebook picture that made the rounds talking about the juxtaposition that shutting down a city to find one suspect is not too much of a burden, but even considering a vote on having a 5 minute background check to purchase a gun is something that the Senate can't agree to do.

[ArtK78]

Posted by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker

 

 

 

I read this post last night. At first, the argument made by Gopnik made some sense - the fact that a major American city would be shut down by the acts of two individuals did seem like an overreaction. But the more that I thought about it, the more that I felt that the author was insulting the city of Boston and its reaction to the situation.

 

Here we have two individuals who have already killed 3 and injured over a hundred individuals with their terroristic acts Monday, followed by the cold blooded murder of an MIT security guard, the shooting of a transit officer, a car jacking at gunpoint, a car chase featuring munitions being thrown out of their car at police, and a full fledged fire fight with law enforcement. Then, after one of the brothers was killed, the other escaped to parts unknown. Given the facts that existed as of Friday morning, the measures taken by Boston and surrounding areas seems perfectly rational to me. To criticize these actions by comparing them to the reaction of London after the 7/7 bombing in a disparaging manner is insulting.

 

Good for London in that it was able to maintain some semblance of normalcy during the hunt for its terrorists. But the situations were not the same. And the result - the capture of the remaining Boston suspect - was surely aided by the measures taken to secure the area while the search was underway.

 

No doubt that other pundits will criticize the measures taken by Boston and surrounding areas in shutting down the city while the suspect was at large. But you probably won't find too much criticism in Boston.

[Winstonm]

It seemed to me that Boston was not hiding due to fear but cooperating with law enforcement's request to stay inside.

[blackshoe]

I thought of it from the very first night, wouldn't this be the type of plot where the assassination of a president is set up by an act like this that basically guarantees that the president will be in Boston to either speak at some service or see some of the wounded or both. Thankfully that sort of fiction is not real life.

I'm no fan of Obama, and I'm not on, much less in charge of, his security detail, but even so I would not bet on that last assumption. If we can think of it, surely so can people who want to assassinate the President.

[barmar]

I didn't think that the shutdown was a "reaction", but a deliberate part of the investigation. Shutting down public transit and Amtrak would make it harder for the perpetrators to escape the area before they were identified. And lots of people in the city would get in the way of investigators.

 

We weren't cowering in fear, we were allowing law enforcement to do their job.

[Cyberyeti]

 

(re president Quayle)

 

As much as that was a joke at the time, obviously most of the people who would assissinate a president wouldn't be stopped by a vice president, even one that most people don't respect. It isn't like the people who plan to assassinate a president are rationally choosing the VP over the POTUS (excepting some JFK conspiracy theories).

 

 

No but it sure as hell incentivised his bodyguards and anybody charged with keeping him safe.