Explosion at Ariana Grande concert in Manchester May 2017 (Also London Bridge/Borough Market attack)

Continued from Ariana Grande concert in Manchester May 2017

...

i really do hate that this keeps happening at live music events. live music has been one of the most important things in my life.

― call all destroyer, Monday, 22 May 2017 21:03 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

two victims named so far, one was 18, one was only 8

flat raided on carlton road in whalley range, my old flat was two minutes away and there's no getting away from the strangeness of seeing this occur in such familiar settings. it's a fairly quiet, leafy corner of manchester, and it's obviously jarring to imagine someone making a nail bomb there (nothing confirmed yet of course). they're releasing photographs of victims now and it's overwhelmingly sad

gonna hug my kids tonight :(

I have been that guy standing outside, waiting for A&A to come out so we could go home in the car.

Obviously, nothing like this happened.

Seeing all the pics going round of the missing kids/siblings/friends, you know, etc.

flat raided on carlton road in whalley range, my old flat was two minutes away and there's no getting away from the strangeness of seeing this occur in such familiar settings. it's a fairly quiet, leafy corner of manchester, and it's obviously jarring to imagine someone making a nail bomb there (nothing confirmed yet of course). they're releasing photographs of victims now and it's overwhelmingly sad

― ogmor, Tuesday, May 23, 2017 1:25 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes i'm half a mile away, loads of sirens not too long ago. helicopter been over twice. working from home today because victoria is on my tram commute to bury. looking out the window on a beautiful warm spring day. and all that misery and lives ruined. sickening.

controlled explosion in Fallowfield

looking at the bbc ticker reading 'trump condemns attackers as evil losers' is inspiring real get-me-off-this-planet feelings

The Superbowl is the metaphor that keeps giving..

god even when Trump is doing something so benign as offering condolences he can't manage to not be deeply off-putting.

I have dealt with 50+ journos online today. Two found my mobile number. This cunt found my house. I still don't know if my brother is alive. pic.twitter.com/NYbLzBsVH0

— Dan Hett (@danhett) May 23, 2017

fucking hell

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/westandtogethermanchester

Re: the Hett family pestered by journalists - fuck that's horrible

"Let me have exclusive access to your suffering "

I can't read this article because my computer's too old to load some websites. Can someone tell me if it covers anything useful? I'm interested in looking at the response to the attacks, which this about, but for obvious reasons don't want to do my own research

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/the-simple-problems-with-the-rights-response-to-the-manchester-attack?utm_source=vicefbuk&utm_campaign=global

cardamon this is a pastebin of that vice article https://pastebin.com/EB2MDC6D

Cheers

yw

A 22-year-old from Manchester has been named by police as the attacker.

this is really sad and scary RIP

"evil losers in life" is pretty fucking otm if you ask me, fuck them

"evil losers in life" is pretty fucking otm if you ask me, fuck them

― flappy bird, Tuesday, May 23, 2017 7:42 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i just watched the clip of the speech and was going to post pretty much the same thing. much as i abhor trump and what he stands for, that kind of unstatesmanlike talk seemed to hit a spot. not exactly diplomacy but sometimes saying it like it is, works. and yes i know a stopped clock etc.

If the Manchester attacker was Palestinian and the victims Israeli, the terrorist's family would receive a stipend from Mahmoud Abbas. pic.twitter.com/gmTqzYwZwY

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) May 23, 2017

^ real

If my daddy's not my daddy but my daddy doesn't know etc

This whole thing seems like an attack on the idea of female empowerment as much as anything else. An audience of mainly teenage girls attending a show on the Dangerous Woman tour - I mean, how could it not be? Just some of the toxic voices we're hearing from now e.g. Hatekins and @prisondipshit remember who they're aligning themselves with when they write their next fucking misogynistic anti-feminist screed.

Very much my thoughts. It feels to me like a very calculated both to attack children and young people in particular, and to attack women in particular, to attack a very female space - a more targeted thing than just a general attack on people who like to drink and enjoy themselves.

*a very calculated thing

(drink/dance/whatever)

do y'all really think there is that level of artist-specific or audience-specific calculation going on though? i'm genuinely curious because to me it just seems purely random. the last big concert attack was Eagles of Death Metal, which is pretty much as far from an Ariana Grande crowd as you can get.

two different forms of idolatry

I think they'll have been looking for a big gathering of people first and foremost

Whether it mattered that it was Ariana Grande and that there'd be lots of girls and young women there - it just feels as though the attacker will have been aware of that. Grande is well-known, talked about a lot, etc, so what 'Ariana Grande' is culturally, symbolically, is not an elusive thing to get?

There is a really good 2-part doc on Arte right now (in French) called Terrorisme, Raison d'Etat, by Ilan Ziv
http://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/064376-000-A/terrorisme-raison-d-etat-1-2

Ziv made another doc about 10 years ago specifically about suicide bombers, how they're recruited, by whom, etc
http://icarusfilms.com/new2002/hw.html

ISIS have claimed responsibility but I don't know how much that means yet. It may have been mostly this one man's invention, or may have had more or less to do with them. Either way, ISIS are definitely culturally literate (members post memes on social media) enough to do artist-specific targeting, and no reason the bomber if acting mostly alone couldn't have been. I have no proof for any of this of course

ISIS is interesting because some random turd can go ahead and do something like this and then ISIS can be like 'oh, ya, that was ummm us, FYI'

Yeah, and the link, the membership, could just be something like a subscription to a video stream

It seems this sort of bomb is not easy to make and operate without specialist help

xp I think it's very important to remember this, by the way, in order to maintain perspective. Even if this particular attack turns out to have been a 'classic' terrorist attack, i.e. made by a concrete organisation with concrete demands and special pin badges to prove membership, still a lot of contemporary attacks are done by individuals whose only contact with such an organisation is online.

Although cf what Tracer Hand says, yes that's a good point. We'll see what emerges I suppose.

that's an important point, and it certainly complicates any narrative you'd want to impose on ISIS-branded attacks. it certainly works in their favor though because even if there was some kind of pattern being orchestrated from above, the lone-wolf factor essentially eradicates that and only makes the whole spectre of terrorism more frighteningly random.

in the online social media materials distributed by isis and the like there is often info regarding bomb making etc.

xp Yeah there's the random factor - but someone acting on their own will struggle to knock out two security guards, or whatever - there are useful limits to how much a lone wolf can do, I guess.

though the perpetrator in this bombing had spent time in Libya so i'd imagine it's not possible to rule out that there's been some irl link. also police were looking for his brother iirc? so maybe not acting totally alone etc. etc. we'll know in due time

for whatever reason this bombing has saddened me more than most - i deliberately don't get emotionally invested in atrocities and disasters if i can help it, buti suspect it's how young so many of the victims and witnesses must have been that has got to me. felt like crying when i read about it yesterday

No problem with that? Your post shows you can separate your inevitable emotions from your take on 'policy'.

This is a well-sourced article about what's currently known

https://www.ft.com/content/93d616a6-3f97-11e7-9d56-25f963e998b2

UK terror threat level raised to 'critical'. Troops could be deployed. More or less a state of emergency, in other words.

xp Could you c+p that, it's paywalled?

(xp) Yet we're still supposed to have a General Election on June 8.

Ok fine nevermind. Progress!

Take it as a misspoken reference to public sphere tbph

Yeah, I assumed that she'd said the wrong word.

Regardless, it wasn't very dignified, was it?

The, er, mother and father of Freudian slips then.

Hmm but then she also says 'society'

The, er, mother and father of Freudian slips then.

Hard to top IDS from the other day - "what we're trying to get away with in our manifesto..."

LOOOL saw that!

In other news, C4 News just interviewed Ginger Steve, a spacey homeless guy who used to hang out with the couriers at the pub under Ed's flat, and he is apparently due praise for tending to a wounded young woman hit by the van at London Bridge last night. Good on you, Steve.

it seems easy to build a picture of how may thinks about things, in a way i wasn't with say, cameron or whatever. i think because she represents a certain type of civil servant i've dealt with almost exactly - the fear of the internet and transparency, the desire for small, private, opaque government, and the contempt for the public, the idea that government is something that should go on far away from them. it's quite reprehensible.

Good post

i prob mentioned before but when trump got elected an edict came down from on high that anyone in the civil service, literally anyone, should not criticise donald trump on social media, to avoid "besmirching the office of the us president" - people prob would have been annoyed except that it was so ludicrous.

Theresa got the memo though.

LOOOL saw that!

In other news, C4 News just interviewed Ginger Steve, a spacey homeless guy who used to hang out with the couriers at the pub under Ed's flat, and he is apparently due praise for tending to a wounded young woman hit by the van at London Bridge last night. Good on you, Steve.

I have been to this pub!!!!

Yes! Along with most of ILX Britisher old school (and a few lucky Americans). It's called The Clerk and Well now and the couriers have mostly gone (along with the table football, snooker and the occasional glimpse of Boris Johnson on both).

This made me cry

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=NDJlPG_M600

I don't even know who Ariana is but what a class act.

Our family vacation has turned out to be educational for my kids in ways I didn't anticipate. We were in Manchester for the one-week memorial for the attack, we went down and saw the square full of balloons and flowers. We're in London this week, so when they woke up this morning I had to tell them what happened overnight. They were dismayed and sad, but not scared. I think terrorism to them is just one of those things that happens, like earthquakes and floods.

Solely judging on some youtube clips of One Love Manchester: What a woman. What a huge, loving heart.

I'm impressed. She didn't have to do anything, and if she did, there were a dozen right things she could have done. That she did this one, and also did it right, warms the heart.

I confess that a fat tear rolled down my cheek during Over the Rainbow.

Yeah, Ari was fantastic. Also really touching to see Miley helping her through it all like a big sister

One of the London Bridge terror attackers was carrying an ID card issued in Ireland when he was shot dead, security sources in the Republic have confirmed.

The Prime Minister has called for barriers to be installed between the pavement and the road on all bridges as a basic safety measure.

Oh wait no she's not done that she's called for a magical regulated Internet to totally prevent maniacs from learning how to drive and stab.

Asim Oddin, 39, who lived near the suspect in Barking said: “He used to park outside the flats which isn’t allowed and blocked everybody. We had an altercation when I told him not to park here. He said “not to follow the system” he was quite rude.”

wake up, sheeple.

an inconsiderate road-user and and murderer? not having that, sorry

we need to crack down on parking offences.

one of the bombers allegedly had an irish id, the irish papers are saying.

There's a suggestion he was a Moroccan living in Dublin - as recently as last year.

Ireland seems to have a relatively large Moroccan community iirc, though that might just be anecdotal.

i have a friend whose family GP when young was harold shipman: asked how she remembers him she doesn't have much more than "he was rude and dismissive of my concerns, me, an impossibly sulky teen with acne" -- but it's not as if she was in the position to say "i remember corpses stacked three deep in the waiting room, i warned everyone but they ignored me"

so this guy's "he was an arsehole and everyone hated him" is almost bound to end up being about small neighbourly infractions -- if he knew worse (and didn't warn the authorities long ago) he obviously puts himself in a terrible position

I don't even know who Ariana is but what a class act.

― Whooremeister (jed_), Sunday, June 4, 2017 6:49 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Safe to say, this clears her for the donut incident.

Asim Oddin, 39, who lived near the suspect in Barking said: “He used to park outside the flats which isn’t allowed and blocked everybody. We had an altercation when I told him not to park here. He said “not to follow the system” he was quite rude.”

If true, speaks volumes

Scotland Yard has named two of the attackers as Khuram Shazad Butt and Rachid Redouane, who are both from Barking in east London.

Khuram Butt, one of the London attackers, appeared in the Channel 4 documentary the Jihadis Next Door last year.

Fuck me, talk about hiding in plain sight

Some serious repercussions to come out of that surely?

Whoever was Home Secretary at the time might have serious questions to answer... oh, hold on.

calls for police to get special permission to monitor broadcast communications

Sounds like some TVs to watch Channel 4 documentaries on jihadis might be more useful.

that's the joke

Too clever for me and Theresa.

jesus

There are reports, quoting neighbours of one of the attackers, that he was driving the van very fast down the wrong lane of a street near where they all lived last Friday. People were freaking out because there were kids playing nearby and so forth. Makes sense now.

Like the Manchester bomber these guys had been reported to the authorities more than once. This is a massive fuck-up and several people deserve to lose their jobs for this, what's the point of requesting ever-more-intrusive surveillance powers when you can't even adequately monitor a guy who's *in a fucking documentary about jihadism*?

Fuck's sake. I mean that's it right? Shows how deep the cuts have gone if they can't catch someone who's been on TV?

There are reports, quoting neighbours of one of the attackers, that he was driving the van very fast down the wrong lane of a street near where they all lived last Friday. People were freaking out because there were kids playing nearby and so forth. Makes sense now.

why would he be doing this in advance of the attack?

.....practice?

or mental preparation

cause he's fuckin kokooroo

Reports that a van has driven into a crowd of people leaving a mosque in Finsbury Park.

Reports of fatalities after a man knocked over many pedestrians near Finsbury Park mosque pic.twitter.com/V6JVNbBR4y

— Shulem Stern (@ShulemStern) June 19, 2017

Feels like it's time for a rolling thread tbh London Rolling

god fucking dammit