London explosions

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Natasha (candygirl)
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Post by Natasha (candygirl) » Jul 21st 2005, 2:52 pm

I can't believe this is happening again. I hope starbug, season, and all our UK members are okay.
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season
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Post by season » Jul 22nd 2005, 5:02 am

I was on the tube yesterday for the first time in ages, and all passengers were evacuatd at High Street Kensington. It was chaos, but I consider myself very lucky and annoyed that these idiots consider it a need to do and humble.

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starbug
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Post by starbug » Jul 22nd 2005, 7:15 am

Checking in!
Yesterday could have been so much worse. Thank god there were no more deaths or injuries, although this time it seems to have been down to incompetence on the bombers' parts - the police say the intent was to kill and so I think they must have found explosives down there.
Perhaps the mixing of the explosives or whatever got all screwed up.

Personally I was away from my office, but i was in Clerkenwell in a different office instead, and it took me forever to get home. I went to my parents' house nearby and just sat it out a bit trying to figure out what was happening. After a while I did get on the tube though.

Breaking news this morning is that the police have shot an asian man on the tube at stockwell station. He is (was?) a suspected suicide bomber. I guess it's not over.

I may have to invest in a bicycle to get to work. At the moment you are 100 times more likely to be killed on your bike than on the tube (have you seen how people drive in london?!) but I don't know... I'm seriously beginning to doubt the tube is the best way to be getting to work. I will have to investigate realistically whether there's a back route I can go, how long it will take, whether I'm fit enough to cycle 13 miles a day etc etc.

Not to mention that it is hard to get anywhere even when the tube is open because people keep leaving bags everywhere that then become security alerts and whole stations are evacuated and closed off. :roll: of course I would rather that than risk death or injury but I do wish people would wake up and take their personal belongings with them when they get up to leave!

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emmie
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Post by emmie » Jul 22nd 2005, 11:28 am

so what the heck is going on with London? I mean, I can sort of understand the bombings taking place during the summitt. but why now? is it just because they know that they will get attention?

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lance
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Post by lance » Jul 23rd 2005, 2:16 pm

emmie wrote:so what the heck is going on with London? I mean, I can sort of understand the bombings taking place during the summitt. but why now? is it just because they know that they will get attention?
I am sooo glad that Starbug is okay, I hope the other UK MSCLers are okay as well.

I heard some security consultant on the TV this week saying that if this was Bin Laden and crew, they typically launch two waves of attacks on a target. One right after another, so goes the theory.

-LanceMan

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starbug
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Post by starbug » Jul 24th 2005, 8:23 am

The thing is, I honestly don't think anyone was expecting another attack so soon. As for motivation, my morbid thought was that maybe enough people weren't killed on 7/7, so they thought they needed more impact. Plus if you think that they possibly didn't get the 'running scared' reaction they were looking for from Londoners, they realised the way to true fear was to launch another attack. One attack has people thinking 'well, that was terrible but it's over now.' Two attacks is more 'holy cr*p, is this going to happen again. Maybe I need to rethink what I'm doing here.'

Unfortunately the man shot in Stockwell tube (I know in the US suspects are shot all the time but here it is a big deal) was innocent, so that's another disaster.

Meanwhile the government is ramping itself up into yet another set of anti-terrorist legislation, targetted at the prevention of the glorification of terrorism. Of course, it's a massive inroad into free speech, extremely vague and completely unnecessary as we already have extensive laws against inciting racial hatred (and that includes hatred against whites), or violence of any kind. the government are also trying to bring in incitement against religious hatred, although that's slightly more complicated and I'm not sure I entirely agree with it*. The point is that the existing laws need to be used more consistently and more often. There isn't any need for further terrorist laws, and neither is there any need to start deporting muslims who live here legally. They commit a crime here, they go to jail here, just like any other citizen. End of story.

I still feel that if we are too willing to change our way of life and our free society too much, the terrorists will have won.

*I just re-read this and thought that without further explanation it makes me look like some sort of neo-nazi or something. So, the reason I'm not sure I agree with it is that protecting religious speech elevates religion above other kinds of belief (eg secular philosophy). I don't think it is necessarily any more wrong for someone to say 'kill all Christians' than it is for them to say 'kill all Marxists'. Because one belief is categorised as 'religious' and another isn't? It also elevates situations where religious hatred is practiced above those which are just as bad. 'Kill all women, kill all gays' etc. I would on balance prefer an offence that was 'incitement to hatred of any kind' but that's also very vague. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I don't think it's necessarily to have piecemeal law. How, for example, do you differentiate between race and religion in any kind of coherent sense? If one offence carries worse penalties than the other, do you have people trying to pick and choose which 'category' they want to put themselves in for any given legal action? It is currently illegal in the UK to discriminate against a black man because he is black. However, it is perfectly possible to discriminate legally against a black rastafarian because he refuses to cut his hair to get a job. Rastafarianism shares many features of a 'religion', yet it not felt by judges (white, male, middle class, british) to warrant that tag. Equally, by the same set of criteria used to judge that case, being a muslim does not fit into the required category of 'shared history, shared geography' that the Lords imposed on Rastafarians. Anyway, I've gone on long enough but I wanted to make it clear why I don't think 'incitement to religious hatred' offences are the answer. You would have to analyse 'what is religion? What is hatred? What is incitement?' before you even got into trying to workably create offences, and that's too big to be pushed through parliament in knee-jerk fashion. Is Scientology a religion?

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