I think there are two reasons why the comparison of Norway's reaction to America's reaction is not completely valid. The first is the population difference (mentioned a lot already). The second is the timeframe. Norway had the benefit of a decade of reflection on the American response to 9/11. It has been fairly obvious that the international community believes the US overreacted.
How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
131–140 of 144 posts
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people accept it without complaining, it works exactly as intended. Let's not assume the people implementing these measures are complete morons. There's power to be gained and money to be made from a submissive, unquestioning people.
You forgot to add, "Wake up sheeple!"
Relevant: http://xkcd.com/1013/
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which I acknowledged. There are no suburbs, in Scandinavia at least, filled with young rightwing extremists getting radicalized.
That's rubbish, there are plenty of scandinavian neo-nazis. They strut around pretending to be vikings and loudly claim to be the master race when drunk. I've run into a few of them. [edit] Also, as a mate of mine pointed out, they can't be real vikings anyway, as then they would be from York or Iceland or somewhere, rather than being descended from the people who were left at home to look after the sheep.
A "viking" was historically someone that went out and traded/plundered/pirated/etc in the ice free part of the year. As a business. (There are historical documents of a Danish king recruiting in Uppsala for an English vacation.) No need to move anyplace to be a viking. Such things aren't unknown in clan cultures (see e.g. Afghanistan).
As I wrote in another comment, you find neonazis in Israel, that doesn't mean they are numerous. Today in Scandinavia, the left wing idiots in organized groups seems more violent than ND etc. I might be wrong, you got a reference?
Edit: Otoh, the word "Viking" has been used for so many things it has lost all specific meaning long ago. :-)
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with you, there is interesting data about effectiveness of these things coming from Israel: Back in 2000, Israel had a series of suicide bombing attacks, which resulted (among other things) in a law requiring every mall, restaurant, cafe, theatre, office buildings and many other businesses to have a full time security guard who will check every person coming in with a metal detector. There were a lot of…
So they spent a lot of money and didn't change the overall outcome? Doesn't sound effective in any way to me.
It's like IT spending for companies that have nothing to do with technology (think about a paper supplier): You have to do it because everyone else is doing it, and if you're the only one NOT doing it, bad things will happen to you.
But once everyone is doing it, everyone is no better off (earningwise) than where they were before.
You have to keep running to stay in the same place.
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is still debate on whether or not he is mentally ill. See day 39 - 40 here, plus closing speeches: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Anders_Behring_Breivik...
I think this debate is in the lawyer land, not in the mental health land.
Well, court-appointed psychiatrists Husby and Sørheim see evidence of paranoid schizophrenia, and court-appointed psychiatrists Aspaas and Tørrissen say that he is not clinically insane.
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or is it only domestic terrorism when the perpetrators are white one wonders! Of course the race (and religion) plays a huge role in the emotional reaction to violence. Uncomparatively more so than the technical "domestic/external" categorization based on residence, citizenship and whatnot. Race and religion are the top factors in eliciting the "us vs them" reaction.
Race isn't the problem, I believe. If Breivik was a convert to Islam, then the reaction would have been different: He would have been taken seriously, not seen as a crazy "one hit wonder". Because of, well, the few right wing crazies in Europe the last few decades.
I realised why people started arguing with me. :-)
I wrote that Europe has few right wing crazies in the last few decades. I meant Scandinavia, I have no real interest/clue where different types of extremists are numerous.
Hrm, sorry about that.
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you on the mass shootings aspect. However... >firearms killings _are_ a pattern, if I recall correctly they are something between 5 and 10 times more frequent in US than other first wold countries. I personally believe that US citizens are unable to understand how dumb their attitude to weapons is, You can't compare crime rates without controlling for other differences. Most other first world countries a…
Thanks for the answer, yes, there are many factors to take into account, but ascribing the high homicide rate only to racial diversity seems reductive. Consider this data[0], in the context of Europe: UK[1] has likely more racial diversity than Denmark and Latvia, but firearm homicides/100k people is lower (0.1 vs 0.3 and 0.2, US has 3.0 ). I imagine that "black poor/uneducated/mistreated people are responsible for m…
>but ascribing the high homicide rate only to racial diversity seems reductive.
I'm not ascribing it to racial diversity. I'll elaborate a bit on exactly what I mean--I'm ascribing it to a particular cultural mix that is in part uniquely derived from the New World's history with slavery.
>n the US this poor are black, while in other countries the social segregation goes around different lines (e.g. gipsies in eastern europe).
That's not comparable, Gypsies do not make up anywhere near the percent of the population in Europe that black americans do in the US (also according to wikipedia we have have more Gypsies in the US than the vast majority of European countries).
>is actually the same as saying "poor/uneducated/mistreated people are responsible for most killing"
That's not correct. If it were that simple, once you adjusted for education and income, you would expect to find similar crime rates between blacks and whites, and nearly identical crime rates between blacks and other minorities. But that isn't the case, a poor uneducated black person is still many times more likely to commit a crime than any other poor uneducated race/ethnicity in the US.
Yes there have been plenty of cases of discrimination against minorities and increased criminality amongst minorities, but there are two factors here which seem to be fairly unique.
1. Descended from slaves. There is no other first world country where 13% of it's population is recently descended from slaves, forcibly moved there. In fact if you'll look at every other country in world that does have a large percentage of slave descendants, you'll find an incredibly high crime rate.
If you look at the top 20 countries by intentional homicide rate[0], you'll note that all but South Africa are in the New World, and have some recent(last 200 years) history of slavery.
2. No other first world country has had such a large single monolithic underclass for nearly its entire history. Underclasses come and go as immigrants assimilate. That hasn't been the case in the us with this one particular group.
In the end what I'm arguing is that you can't compare the U.S. to Europe, there are just too many differences to take into account. Take 2 separate groups in the US--blacks and whites--adjust for income--and you'll find that whites, even poor uneducated ones, have a similar homicide rate to other first world countries. Therefore gun ownership/access is not what causes our high homicide rate.
I would argue that if you banned guns tomorrow, and every law abiding citizen in the US decided to march down to the police station and turn in his gun, we would still have a murder rate much higher than nearly every country in Europe.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... Note that the top 20 countries have far higher murder rates than the next 20
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#138It seems like every time I read something new from Schneier I lose a little of the respect he's built up over the years. Are you really going to pretend the threat posed by one self-taught and self-financed guy with no friends is in any way comparable to that of a well-financed international terrorist organization with a shared ideology that has deep cultural and religious ties? Really? Of course Norway's response is…
This makes sense if you're assuming the security legislation comes only from an honest effort to fight terrorism. Whatever else we disagree on, I think we're past that on HN.
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#139It seems like every time I read something new from Schneier I lose a little of the respect he's built up over the years. Are you really going to pretend the threat posed by one self-taught and self-financed guy with no friends is in any way comparable to that of a well-financed international terrorist organization with a shared ideology that has deep cultural and religious ties? Really? Of course Norway's response is…
This makes sense if you're assuming the security legislation comes only from an honest effort to fight terrorism. Whatever else we disagree on, I think we're past that on HN.
Which makes sense if you believe the people trying to grapple with this particular threat have the same set of goals and opinions. I do think the vast majority of people involved in crafting security legislation do so in an honest effort to fight terrorism.
Re: How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would I be wrong in assuming that perhaps trained military personnel may be easier to deal with and more level headed than some plastic policeman with a weekend certificate in security and law enforcement? Just putting it out there. It could be better than the alternative.
In Geneva(Switzerland) they tried to use military at protests some 20-30 years ago. Some people were killed, thing is military are trained to kill if they are being attacked. As far as I know they haven't used military personnel after that...
Good point. Didn't think about that.
I just feel like my order of trust (for law enforcers) goes something like this:
1) Military personnel 2) Police 3) * 4) Private security
* In general I trust anything or anyone over private security.