171–180 of 345 posts
The comments there are... as expected I guess.
What didn't you expect? Hug-protest and tolerance march? People in Benelux are scared since November, after Paris attacks underground was blocked for a few days and military with full armament was on every corner.
Anything even remotely rational.
What I find reassuring in the midst of this tragic mayhem however, is how little actual damage the terrorists could do. They had explosives, weapons, the resolve to sacrifice themselves and tried their best to do as much damage as possible. And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count). Of course every death that brought on by this fanatic mob is too much, but we should keep our perspective. A b…
Driving a car at least gives you the opportunity to reject taking on the risk.
The fabric of society is based around us not shooting each other/ blowing up trains. Every event like this (or, say, some countries bombing out neighborhoods in other countries) makes it harder to rely on the idea that this sort of thing doesn't happen.
Acknowledging that this happens because of conscious policy decisions by many people is also good.
There's absolutely nothing inevitable about these kinds of attacks. We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Not to mention that it's possible to worry about car crashes and terrorism at the same time
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - How come this happens again without anyone having seen it coming? Knowing how Belgium handles their minorities in Brussels, it's not a big surprise. The fact that this happens now is neither a surprise. Salah Abdeslam has been caught, and there were messages that he wanted to cooperate with the Belgium police. Whether it's true or not, if they were planning something, and he knew about it, waiting was not a real…
Knowing how Belgium handles their minorities in Brussels, it's not a big surprise Could you elaborate? Is this a banlieu situation?
Belgium has big problems between the Flemish and French speaking parts, and particularly in Brussels it's politically very complicated. For some city wide measures, they need like 26 police commanders to agree. I don't know the numbers, but it's very complex to get all people in line. And I'm not talking about the people in the street, this is about city councils, police departments etc.
Brussels itself resembles the EU in this respect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think investing in explosives detection is a better approach. It is an irony that there were explosions at the airport while they are screening you completely before boarding a flight.
Many commonplace chemicals, such as hand sanitizer, confound the explosives detectors used at airports. Dogs can only work a very limited time before their sense of smell gets fatigued. Moreover, the bomb was set off outside the secure area. It is VERY likely that existing security measures got more people killed because there are dense crowds waiting to clear security. This exact type of attack, outside the secure a…
Any security lines are actually past passport control, and I've never seen them particularly packed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they're born in the country and lived there their whole life, they're local by any non-racist definition.
That's rather disingenuous. They are second generation immigrants of a particular religion that seems to be coincidentally associated time after time in these incidents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a clear weakness of airports: where people regroup even before reaching the terminal, with no surveillance or security checks whatsoever. And that's not just in Brussels.
Only place I've seen some security checks was at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, where there was a mild security check when entering the airport. This consisted of a small interview on what I've been doing in Israel, where I am going to, with whom and who packed my stuff. This all was before even entering the actual terminal building.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - How come this happens again without anyone having seen it coming? Knowing how Belgium handles their minorities in Brussels, it's not a big surprise. The fact that this happens now is neither a surprise. Salah Abdeslam has been caught, and there were messages that he wanted to cooperate with the Belgium police. Whether it's true or not, if they were planning something, and he knew about it, waiting was not a real…
Knowing how Belgium handles their minorities in Brussels, it's not a big surprise Could you elaborate? Is this a banlieu situation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What didn't you expect? Hug-protest and tolerance march? People in Benelux are scared since November, after Paris attacks underground was blocked for a few days and military with full armament was on every corner.
s/Benelux/Brussels/, perhaps Belgium.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a mess larger than I can comprehend, with scores of innocent dead. What's most sad about it, is that the current situation is the result of doing nothing, despite having crystal clear data on the situation, and in which (wrong) direction things has been changing. It's been clear that something needs to be done for years, even decades, but actually doing something about the situation would mean publicly ackn…
> It's been clear that something needs to be done for years And what? That "something" needs to be done was clear since the 80s, but so far constructive solutions have been rather sparse. Integration is too expensive to the austerity and privatization loving right wing, and expulsion doesn't work because our economies depend on cheap immigrant labour. So far I've not seen anyone seen pushing for a different solution.
Say what you will about America's institutional racism, but I have rarely heard an American whine about people not acting American enough (maybe I'm hanging in the wrong circles)
Meanwhile I would hear a lot of complaining about riff raff accumulating around ethnic grocers and the like messing up the "culture " of downtown Nantes.
The integration fallacy is one that is doomed to fail from the outset. The people define an area, not the other way around. Let people do what they want, the free flow of ideas will do the rest.