Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 71 posts

Re: How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

#41

Post by [deleted] »

MicroBerto wrote: post #21
yardie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've traveled between London and Paris frequently. I found the visibility of fundamentalist muslims in the UK to be much higher than anywhere in France. The burka and niqab, for example, is not only illegal but even before being so it was extremely unpopular in France (I believe the estimate was ~200 for the entire country). Yet, walking around London and it's outskirts this was a common sight. France has managed to…

> France has managed to avoid most islamic extremists Yet any extremist can literally walk into France and terrorize, which is essentially what's happened. So perhaps the biggest difference the fact that Britain has a physical border wall?

[deleted]

Re: How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

#42

Post by sevenless »

bybjorn wrote: post #32
sevenless wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, we don't know the motivation of the Nice attack, so we can't yet say it was certainly terrorism. It was certainly a deliberate act of mass murder but that does not necessarily mean it was a terrorist attack, which implies a political or religious motivation to terrorize (as opposed to, say, mental illness or general hatefulness). For example most US mass shootings are not considered terrorism. I rea…

You do not believe the reports that he was shouting "allahu akbar" then? Also, check the latest news on the "cryptic sms's" sent from his phone.

The information content of "Allah Ackbar" from an Arabic speaker is essentially nil - it's used the same way English speakers use "Oh my god" - but him asking another involved party for "more weapons" via SMS, if true, suggests it was a coordinated attack and most likely terrorism.

Re: How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

#43

Post by leonroy »

yardie wrote: post #14
hliyan wrote: post #2

Attributing all this to intelligence sharing alone seems an oversimplification. I suspect the difference in the level of assimilation between British Muslims and their French counterparts is the biggest factor.

I've traveled between London and Paris frequently. I found the visibility of fundamentalist muslims in the UK to be much higher than anywhere in France. The burka and niqab, for example, is not only illegal but even before being so it was extremely unpopular in France (I believe the estimate was ~200 for the entire country). Yet, walking around London and it's outskirts this was a common sight. France has managed to…

> The burka and niqab, for example, is not only illegal but even before being so it was extremely unpopular in France (I believe the estimate was ~200 for the entire country). Yet, walking around London and it's outskirts this was a common sight.

I think outlawing religious dress or other iconography simply ends up giving ammunition to religious extremists and further divides already segregated communities from the mainstream.

Re: How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

#44

Post by Kurtz79 »

I would be very careful in publishing such "pat-in-the-back" articles.

I remember reading a NYT article shortly after the Paris attacks that said something like "this could never happen in the US" (because of better intelligence and integration), and then the San Bernardino shootings happened soon after and the Orlando shooting later...

(found it: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/opinion/could-paris-happen...)

While UK DOES have probably a better Intelligence than most European countries, it also has the advantages of being an island and being outside the Schengen area, so entry in the country is much easier to monitor by the authorities.

It is also clear that, unlike UK, France has been singled out as the main EU target by the terrorists. Spain has been safe even longer than UK, and Italy has never been attacked, although both countries experience a constant flux of migrants from northern Africa and it's hard to think of their Intelligence agencies as better than the French one.

Re: How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

#45

Post by zuminator »

DominikR wrote: post #38
sevenless wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, we don't know the motivation of the Nice attack, so we can't yet say it was certainly terrorism. It was certainly a deliberate act of mass murder but that does not necessarily mean it was a terrorist attack, which implies a political or religious motivation to terrorize (as opposed to, say, mental illness or general hatefulness). For example most US mass shootings are not considered terrorism. I rea…

Yeah, I've noticed that Liberals/Socialists nowadays tend to split hairs to relabel terrorists as something else. So it's not a jihadist terror attack but instead the cause is repressed homosexuality or toxic male masculinity. I was speechless when a few days ago Obama said it was hard to "untangle" the true motives of the guy that shot 5 police officers in Dallas even though the attacker himself stated he wanted to…

Wanting to kill as many whites and police officers as possible isn't a motive, it's a description. True motives means, what triggered this previously law-abiding man to go off like that?

Re: How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

#46

Post by EGreg »

Terrorism is a problem of technology. As technology gets better so does the ability for a small group of people to inflict damage. A quiet surveillance state is the inevitable response, and this is what's being described.

AI and drones are the next step, because they are autonomous. It is not known yet how to deal with that. States may soon try to lock down all code for drones and AI from being used by the public.

Re: How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

#49

Post by DominikR »

zuminator wrote: post #45
DominikR wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've noticed that Liberals/Socialists nowadays tend to split hairs to relabel terrorists as something else. So it's not a jihadist terror attack but instead the cause is repressed homosexuality or toxic male masculinity. I was speechless when a few days ago Obama said it was hard to "untangle" the true motives of the guy that shot 5 police officers in Dallas even though the attacker himself stated he wanted to…

Wanting to kill as many whites and police officers as possible isn't a motive, it's a description. True motives means, what triggered this previously law-abiding man to go off like that?

The Dallas shooter showed support for several "Black Power Groups" - I'm sure these are not racist like White Power groups are.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/suspect-in-dallas-attac...

Meanwhile people at Black Lives Matter protests chant "Kill cops" and "Pigs In A Blanket, Fry 'Em Like Bacon!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj4ARsxrZh8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xNxoeqf0Ws

Hard to untangle what is going on here.

> what triggered this previously law-abiding man to go off like that

Typical liberal statement, the perpetrator of a crime is the victim. Something triggered him to do it! Remove the triggers and all will be fine.

Re: How Britain has been kept safe for a decade

#50

Post by PaulKeeble »

sevenless wrote: post #7

Touch a big fucking piece of wood with that title, BBC. Guns are much rarer in the UK than on the continent. This obviously doesn't make attacks impossible but it does make life harder for terrorists. For example, the maniac who murdered Lee Rigby with a knife tried to get a gun first. All he could get was a modified starter pistol that jammed on the first shot. The right wing terrorist who murdered Jo Cox apparently…

Take a look at the homicide data alongside gun crime and none of the law changes that reduced gun ownership in the last 50 years has made any noticeable difference to the correlation.

As you go around the world and you look at the number of guns per populace the rates of homicide using them vastly differs, Norway isn't a violent place nor does it have a lot of gun crime but it has a lot of guns. There is plenty of automatic weapon use in the UK, there doesn't appear to be serious problems with smuggling guns in, the only difference is only the bad guys can have them there is no sport use or recreational use at all.

Post reply on HN