Watching CNN's coverage of this and Wolf "Volfie" Blitzer is obsessed with asking everyone "Is this terrorism?! Has the gov't called this terrorism?!" Ever since BENGHAZI!, everyone seems more interested in the semantics of the whole thing, as opposed to just having common sense and concern over what is actually happening. In Paris tonight, there have been at least two separate shootings, bombing at the main soccer stadium and a hostage situation at a concert hall–all happening nearly simultaneously. It's obviously terrorism. This obsession by the media and others with the semantics of everything is just fucking ridiculous.
It's obviously terrorism, it's just that Wolf, like many others, has decided "terrorism" is shorthand for "Muslims". Like, if it turns out to be right-wing Christians of European descent. well, uh, MENTAL HEALTH!! STREET GANGS!! ANYTHING OTHER THAN TERRORISM!!
They really ought to call it the Guantánamo Effect.
Trouble is they've debased the word so much that whenever something we don't like happens, we want to call it terrorism. E.g., some anti-sprawl activist starts a fire in an under-constuction apartment complex at night, nobody is hurt, nothing is damaged but a bunch of 2x4s, and they call it "eco-terorism."
Dudes at multiple locations raining down gunfire on random pedestrians in Paris? Yep, that's terrifying.
I see a tab at the top of the RSS drop-down box reading "All blog posts," which seems like it might result in a very full in-box. All blog posts? All of the internet?
One of the things I learned at my local Wonkette Drinky Thing is that no one really notices most of my comments, or if they do, they don't remember that it was Lot_49 and not some other, much more brilliant and humorous commenter who made the comment.
Dunno. Do you see it? I only see it when I type in the reply box. Maybe it's always been there and I've just never noticed it before. That is a distinct possibility.
Then I'm guessing it's just that I've never noticed it before. I've been doing an online training all day for work, a bit numbing, mind wandering.
If it's anything like the training I remember my mom doing for tax season, it sounds incredibly hard to handle.
Kind of like that. It's our slow time of year at work, so they have us do training sessions to get ready for the upcoming year. I just finished one on updates to our security system, now this one on demographics. They're useful, but just long and dull. Thank god I have Cheez-its.
I love that right wingers are now saying, "KiIl all Muslims! Raze the mosques!" Because rounding up and eliminating a religious minority in Europe has always worked out so well in the past.
Had to look up how many refugees France agreed to take in… turns out around 24,000 over the next two years except, not even joking, the refugees have been refusing to be placed in France because they know how shitty Muslims are treated there.
Some believer should be able to proffer a supportable hypothesis as to why a merciful and just Yah-Weh allows such terrible testosterone-fueled rage to be acted out this way.
I know I am a terrible asshole, but the fact that the parents of the members of THE EAGLES OF DEATH METAL put out message letting all their fans know that the band is safe — AKA, they ran away, leaving their audience being held hostage by whoever these bad guys behind in a cloud of dust — incredibly hilarious. So brave. So metal.
I saw an explanation that the name is a joke, as in "The Eagles" of Death Metal. Also, too, if I had the chance to run away in such a situation, I would run away.
Multiple coordinated attacks in the heart of Paris, timed to hit during the busiest time, inflict maximum civilian casualties and cause maximum disruption. Small groups of young men with Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives, at least one suicide bomber. Reminds me a lot of the Mumbai assault. This took a LOT of planning and local expertise. French experts are saying "homegrown".
3 or 4 guys attacked the concert, shooting and throwing bombs at the audience. That was no hostage situation, that was mass murder. Police broke the siege an hour ago, killed at least 2.
Paris is locked down, the French army and anti-terror police are flooding the streets and conducting raids. Hospitals have implemented emergency "Code White" – the last time was the "Charlie Hebdo" massacre.
France has called a state of national emergency and closed all its borders. First time since 1945.
Oh, yeah, I actually can get that. I've seen some of their articles, so maybe that would be a good place to look on TV as well. We just basically went from 3 to 7 all-day news channels in the span of a year here, so there's quite a few I haven't looked at.
The Paris police prefect has now confirmed that the attackers at the Bataclan rock venue blew themselves up with suicide belts as police closed in, killing four.
He said the gunmen first sprayed cafes outside the venue with machine gunfire, then went inside the concert hall and killed more before the assault by security forces.
The prefect, Michel Cadot, said one set of attackers was at the Stade de France, and at nearly the same time the second group attacked within the city.
Cadot said all the attackers are believed dead, although authorities are hunting for any possible accomplices.
Looks likely that the attack portion of this is finally over.
Back in the day, before you were born and dinosaurs roamed the land, there as a thing, it was called |The Fairness Doctrine.| It required media outlets to present all information in a way that the FCC determined was fair and equitable. It wasn't a thing about giving competing idiots equal time, the concept was to hold media outlets responsible in each news item they presented, for not veering into lies and yellow journalism, to manipulate the public to nefarious ends.
But then in 1985, our lord and savior Ronald Reagan realized how silly and useless the Fairness Doctrine was, and he got rid of it. Without that constraint, media outlets became free to report "news" or whatever, in as distorted a manner as they saw fit, and thus we got Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and all the rest.
There will be a test on this. Please be sure to bring your Number 2 pencil.
The good news is that, (at least I think this is the case,) that the tide is beginning to turn. It will be a slow process to undo the damage, but I think that it is starting. I don't think this cycle or anytime soon we'll see the Fairness Doctrine or something similar back in place, but there's such a shift on so many things that I think the boat is starting to turn around.
Seriously though, it'll probably be decades before we can get anything like the Fairness Doctrine, but I'll take any sort of progress from the Fox News/talk radio/Breitbart circle of insanity.
Very true. But to play devil's advocate, sometimes the consensus builds quickly behind something that people never thought would happen in their lifetime. I'm thinking of gay marriage, Keystone XL and Obamacare mainly, but also the Civil Rights Act, and going back further, women's suffrage, which came down to one vote by one state legislator in Tennessee. I think the next domino to fall will be prison reform, which is already starting in California, election reform (also already starting in CA and a few other states, making registration automatic with a driver's license) and the tax structure. But I think some modern form of the Fairness Doctrine could happen faster than seems the case now, once the public rallies around it, but yes, like you said, I don't think it's time has come yet.
You have a very good point there. I didn't think gay marriage would happen as quickly as it did (not a lifetime thing, but didn't think it would be done by 2015) and here we are. Might take courts for electoral reform as well, considering some states might never give that up without a court order.
Yes. You are prob right. I am guessing it will be come down to a test case making its way to SCOTUS that ends up rolling back their Voting Rights Act bullshit decision. And I don't think we'll get that as long as Roberts is there.
Vote for Democrats, etc etc.
He's pretty young, too. I don't see him going into the night before I do.
I had a button, at one time, that said "I Survived the Reagan Administration".
It's just different now, not necessarily better or worse. Time tends to filter away the chaff when it comes to history, art, culture… we only remember mostly the good stuff. News has always been a process, there has always been bad initial information, missteps, omissions.
Again, when you're only doing one very curated news report a day and one on Sunday, and we only remember the highlights, it's easy through the lens of nostalgia to forget the mistakes.
Watching CNN's coverage of this and Wolf "Volfie" Blitzer is obsessed with asking everyone "Is this terrorism?! Has the gov't called this terrorism?!" Ever since BENGHAZI!, everyone seems more interested in the semantics of the whole thing, as opposed to just having common sense and concern over what is actually happening. In Paris tonight, there have been at least two separate shootings, bombing at the main soccer stadium and a hostage situation at a concert hall–all happening nearly simultaneously. It's obviously terrorism. This obsession by the media and others with the semantics of everything is just fucking ridiculous.
It's obviously terrorism, it's just that Wolf, like many others, has decided "terrorism" is shorthand for "Muslims". Like, if it turns out to be right-wing Christians of European descent. well, uh, MENTAL HEALTH!! STREET GANGS!! ANYTHING OTHER THAN TERRORISM!!
Ferguson Effect! Thanks, Obama!
They really ought to call it the Guantánamo Effect.
Trouble is they've debased the word so much that whenever something we don't like happens, we want to call it terrorism. E.g., some anti-sprawl activist starts a fire in an under-constuction apartment complex at night, nobody is hurt, nothing is damaged but a bunch of 2x4s, and they call it "eco-terorism."
Dudes at multiple locations raining down gunfire on random pedestrians in Paris? Yep, that's terrifying.
As usual, we are importing our culture to France.
Off topic to everything, but is anyone else seeing a "subscribe to replies/all new comments" drop down box? When did this occur?
I see a tab at the top of the RSS drop-down box reading "All blog posts," which seems like it might result in a very full in-box. All blog posts? All of the internet?
I never even clicked on that before.
One of the things I learned at my local Wonkette Drinky Thing is that no one really notices most of my comments, or if they do, they don't remember that it was Lot_49 and not some other, much more brilliant and humorous commenter who made the comment.
Does Wonkville even exist? Are we just screaming into the void?
It's just pixels, after all.
Forever?
Dunno. Do you see it? I only see it when I type in the reply box. Maybe it's always been there and I've just never noticed it before. That is a distinct possibility.
I first saw it back on old Wonkville, actually. Never used it though.
Then I'm guessing it's just that I've never noticed it before. I've been doing an online training all day for work, a bit numbing, mind wandering.
If it's anything like the training I remember my mom doing for tax season, it sounds incredibly hard to handle.
Kind of like that. It's our slow time of year at work, so they have us do training sessions to get ready for the upcoming year. I just finished one on updates to our security system, now this one on demographics. They're useful, but just long and dull. Thank god I have Cheez-its.
No?
I love that right wingers are now saying, "KiIl all Muslims! Raze the mosques!" Because rounding up and eliminating a religious minority in Europe has always worked out so well in the past.
Now they have their excuse not to take in any more of the refugees.
Count is 35 now, and 100 hostages.
Also too, there's even already a Wikipedia page for this, "November 2015 Paris Attacks."
Had to look up how many refugees France agreed to take in… turns out around 24,000 over the next two years except, not even joking, the refugees have been refusing to be placed in France because they know how shitty Muslims are treated there.
It is kinda ironic that Germany is both the main relocation goal and that Germany is the most accepting.
CNN reported that French BFMTV said at least 60 dead. It's only going to get worse, I'm afraid.
There are plenty of white Europeans who are and will be calling for a new "Final Solution," I'm afraid.
A lot of those people have probably been waiting for an excuse, honestly.
Nobody is blaming the rock music yet?
This is too terrible to make with the funny, sry
Some believer should be able to proffer a supportable hypothesis as to why a merciful and just Yah-Weh allows such terrible testosterone-fueled rage to be acted out this way.
So this news broke while I was out and I was kind of lost for words for the next hour. Sounds like there's a lot more we don't know than what we do.
I know I am a terrible asshole, but the fact that the parents of the members of THE EAGLES OF DEATH METAL put out message letting all their fans know that the band is safe — AKA, they ran away, leaving their audience being held hostage by whoever these bad guys behind in a cloud of dust — incredibly hilarious. So brave. So metal.
<img src="http://www.cringechannel.com/wp-content/sp-resources/forum-image-uploads/spaih/2014/05/now-thats-what-i-call-edgy.png" />
Their street cred is just shot. Which was probably the whole point of this attack. They should look into rival metal bands.
I saw an explanation that the name is a joke, as in "The Eagles" of Death Metal. Also, too, if I had the chance to run away in such a situation, I would run away.
Al Jazeera saying 100 dead at the concert alone. Fuck.
I saw that from a French source just now, this is awful.
They just changed the chyron to read 100 "feared" dead…
Most places seem to be reporting the 100 now, this sadly looks like as bad as we had feared.
Everything is terrible.
<img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/T5wQ1H6gtClt6/giphy.gif">
Watching this. Not because I want to, but It's what I always feel compelled to do.
|BBC World,| |the Guardian UK| has live coverage, |France 24| of course has very good live coverage. CNN is worthless.
Multiple coordinated attacks in the heart of Paris, timed to hit during the busiest time, inflict maximum civilian casualties and cause maximum disruption. Small groups of young men with Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives, at least one suicide bomber. Reminds me a lot of the Mumbai assault. This took a LOT of planning and local expertise. French experts are saying "homegrown".
3 or 4 guys attacked the concert, shooting and throwing bombs at the audience. That was no hostage situation, that was mass murder. Police broke the siege an hour ago, killed at least 2.
Paris is locked down, the French army and anti-terror police are flooding the streets and conducting raids. Hospitals have implemented emergency "Code White" – the last time was the "Charlie Hebdo" massacre.
France has called a state of national emergency and closed all its borders. First time since 1945.
I hate this New World Order.
The Guardian always seems to be on top of huge events. I wish our media in the US was that good.
Al Jazeera US, if you can get it.
Oh, yeah, I actually can get that. I've seen some of their articles, so maybe that would be a good place to look on TV as well. We just basically went from 3 to 7 all-day news channels in the span of a year here, so there's quite a few I haven't looked at.
I couldn't watch it until they finally got an HD studio.
Horrible.
This is flying around Twitter, courtesy French artist |Jean Jullien.|
<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTvCwZSUsAAz_f_.jpg"/>
Want. T-Shirt.
It's perfect.
Amazing.
Probably? The rush wasn't there, but also there was no one to correct them if they were wrong (or lying by omission).
From the Guardian:
The Paris police prefect has now confirmed that the attackers at the Bataclan rock venue blew themselves up with suicide belts as police closed in, killing four.
He said the gunmen first sprayed cafes outside the venue with machine gunfire, then went inside the concert hall and killed more before the assault by security forces.
The prefect, Michel Cadot, said one set of attackers was at the Stade de France, and at nearly the same time the second group attacked within the city.
Cadot said all the attackers are believed dead, although authorities are hunting for any possible accomplices.
Looks likely that the attack portion of this is finally over.
Back in the day, before you were born and dinosaurs roamed the land, there as a thing, it was called |The Fairness Doctrine.| It required media outlets to present all information in a way that the FCC determined was fair and equitable. It wasn't a thing about giving competing idiots equal time, the concept was to hold media outlets responsible in each news item they presented, for not veering into lies and yellow journalism, to manipulate the public to nefarious ends.
But then in 1985, our lord and savior Ronald Reagan realized how silly and useless the Fairness Doctrine was, and he got rid of it. Without that constraint, media outlets became free to report "news" or whatever, in as distorted a manner as they saw fit, and thus we got Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and all the rest.
There will be a test on this. Please be sure to bring your Number 2 pencil.
Why is it that every bad thing tends to lead back to Ronald Reagan? No wonder the right loves him.
The good news is that, (at least I think this is the case,) that the tide is beginning to turn. It will be a slow process to undo the damage, but I think that it is starting. I don't think this cycle or anytime soon we'll see the Fairness Doctrine or something similar back in place, but there's such a shift on so many things that I think the boat is starting to turn around.
Yay, a glimmer of hope!
Seriously though, it'll probably be decades before we can get anything like the Fairness Doctrine, but I'll take any sort of progress from the Fox News/talk radio/Breitbart circle of insanity.
Very true. But to play devil's advocate, sometimes the consensus builds quickly behind something that people never thought would happen in their lifetime. I'm thinking of gay marriage, Keystone XL and Obamacare mainly, but also the Civil Rights Act, and going back further, women's suffrage, which came down to one vote by one state legislator in Tennessee. I think the next domino to fall will be prison reform, which is already starting in California, election reform (also already starting in CA and a few other states, making registration automatic with a driver's license) and the tax structure. But I think some modern form of the Fairness Doctrine could happen faster than seems the case now, once the public rallies around it, but yes, like you said, I don't think it's time has come yet.
You have a very good point there. I didn't think gay marriage would happen as quickly as it did (not a lifetime thing, but didn't think it would be done by 2015) and here we are. Might take courts for electoral reform as well, considering some states might never give that up without a court order.
Yes. You are prob right. I am guessing it will be come down to a test case making its way to SCOTUS that ends up rolling back their Voting Rights Act bullshit decision. And I don't think we'll get that as long as Roberts is there.
Vote for Democrats, etc etc.
He's pretty young, too. I don't see him going into the night before I do.
I had a button, at one time, that said "I Survived the Reagan Administration".
I'm sure that's wrong.
Nothing that right could ever be wrong.
Well at least |Justin Bieber is bravely going ahead with his Paris concert.|
One World Trade Center, New York, NY. The spire illuminated in French flag colors tonight.
<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTu_DpDUkAAmP8u.jpg:large"/>
Oh, I think I do: http://screamintothevoid.com/
Um… well…
<img src="http://www.trbimg.com/img-50222f13/turbine/chi-histdewey_truman20080104104817/500/500×281"/>
It's just different now, not necessarily better or worse. Time tends to filter away the chaff when it comes to history, art, culture… we only remember mostly the good stuff. News has always been a process, there has always been bad initial information, missteps, omissions.
Again, when you're only doing one very curated news report a day and one on Sunday, and we only remember the highlights, it's easy through the lens of nostalgia to forget the mistakes.
This does make me wonder what the 1952 equivalent to the Baby Hitler question would be.
The RNCNRA will take it into oblivion..
Ben Carson?