They're calling it a "bombeeksplosion i regjeringskvartalet."

And that's "Bomb explosion in government square".

Currently, they're saying several dead and injured, and police are looking for two more bombs. Looks like there's a lot of confusion, so there's nothing definite yet.

(Myself, I'm on the other side of the country and at work so I can't be stuck to the news.)

MaajidNawaz
Dear #Oslo residents-people still trapped in buildings-phone's will jam,unlock your WiFi signals,let trapped people communicate via wireless

Just, good God.

Dear Lord.

I'm wondering the same thing everyone else is, of course. Who? Why?

(And how quickly will people leap to conclusions in the absence of evidence?)

Horrible.

Prayers for all effected in this.

I was nowhere near the explosion, and didn't hear anything, but everyone who was downtown tells me they felt the blast shake the buildings they were in. I first heard about it via my cousin's facebook status update.

I have the tv on in the background. They are now saying someone dressed as a policeman opened fire with a handgun at this youth camp summit gathering. The only thing they can say is that they don't know what's going on yet. No-one as yet has claimed responsibility for anything.

The police are evacuating buildings in the center of town, possibly due to suspicious packages, or possibly not. The early story was that the police blocked off the buildings, and then kept expanding the blockade outwards.

Turns out events are changing faster than I can muster my mind to write this post. I just heard that the gunman at the youth camp may have been captured.

They're calling it the worst thing to hit Norway since World War 2, and it's probably true. Norway has indeed been very peaceful, and while even the rest of oh so civilized Europe has seen terrible things happening in recent years, Norway seemed to me to have managed to stay out of it, and remain peaceful. I don't know how long I thought that would last, especially after the bombing in Stockholm last year.
Right now I just fear to see how this country will react to an attack unlike anything it has seen in the past lifetime. It could get very ugly.

I guess Oslo is where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, so if you're an implacable enemy of peace you might attack Oslo. Plenty of those around. Still seems a stretch.

My heart and thoughts go out to all the victims and responders and their family and friends.

(Had written "berserk" not "nuts" until I realized that this is a rare example of the former term's resembling an ethnic slur.)

Have troops in Afghanistan. Have newspapers that published the infamous Muhammed caricatures. We've been threatened with terrorist attacks for years now.

They've arrested the shooter at the Labour Party Youth camp. He was dressed as a policeman, and is allegedly a man of 'Nordic look' with blond hair.

How do you accidentally claim credit for a terror attack? "Oh man, I *thought* those were our guys, but it's someone else. Oops!"

... Meanwhile, reports of 20+ dead teens at the youth-camp shooting. What a horror.

I'm against the death penalty, I am, I am! Shit.

In re: "why?" I saw elsewhere the comment "The problem with senseless violence is that it's senseless." I think, sometimes, there's no real reason that rational people can accept because the perpetrators aren't working under anything we would think of as logic.

Too much suffering for my conscience, and not enough for my feelings.

It is certainly possible to think, "Oh man, I thought it was a good idea to claim those were our guys, but it turns out that's not so wise after all," regardless of actual involvement. Or, "You incompetent minion, what are you doing claiming credit for this; you're going to get us all arrested."

(Your link @14 also has been updated, and notes that this sort of claim/counterclaim thing is fairly common.)

A horror, indeed, regardless.

As to news updates, the online media here in Norway reports that the sole captured suspect so far is not know to be affiliated with known groups.

As to the fears of Kristian, so far it seems that the best sides of Norwegian and Oslo spirit has come to the fore.

I'm very, very glad to live outside a vigilante-"justice" system.

That said, the victims are just as dead, and it's a terrible day for everyone in Oslo (and, by extension, the rest of us as well).

I did note, with interest, Prime Minister Stoltenberg's statement that the answer to violence is *more* democracy. It's a statement some American politicians might need to hear...

KristianB, I'm so very sorry. I'm sorry for everyone, but the closer you are, the worse it is.

* * *

I guarantee that conservatives in the U.S. will react to right wing nut violence by smugly pointing out that the kids at that camp could have fought back if they had guns. (And probably go on to blame high taxes, deficit spending, and socialism.)

I hope whoever made that comment blows his or her own foot off with a gun.

No. No, that won't happen. You underestimate the limitless capacity for self-delusion. They'll claim it was an inside job by the government, or that the guy was secretly a Muslim, or that he was set up, or that the buildings that blew up had a history of gas leaks. Anything to avoid damaging their narrative.

What ought to happen is a recognition that the same "these people who commit terrorism are not anywhere close to normal for their culture" applies to brown-skinned extremists just as much as it does to blond-haired ones.

Absolutely. That's why, for instance, the New York Times' coverage of the incident includes gems like this:

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al Qaeda’s brutality and multiple attacks.

“If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington. “One lesson I take away from this is that attacks, especially in the West, are going to move to automatic weapons.”

Got that? Islamic terrorists didn't do it, but they're still to blame. Never mind McVeigh, never mind the Troubles. We didn't get it wrong with our rampant and irresponsible speculation in advance of the evidence; it still is the brown people's fault.

Sheesh.

yeah...

I'm mostly in speechless mode myself, this is truly horrific. Especially hearing reports from survivors from the island. It's like out of a horror movie.

Alas, no.

What a horror.

After 9/11, airline passengers stopped being quiescent in the face of attempted terrorism.

This isn't quite the same. It's not even close to an "everyone dies" situation. There's still going to be the fear and panic. But, the number of people on that island, there's enough that some will be able to fight well. I get the impression from the reports that the perp was hunting victims, only now he'd be hunted too.

It's not going to be good for the older, more athletic, teens on the island, who will be wondering why they didn't fight back.

I think there's a huge difference between being on an airplane, with no chance of escape, and being in a crowd under fire.

The calculation for the passengers on a hijacked airplane has indeed changed. It used to be that if they cooperated they would increase their chances of survival, because the hijackers cared about their own lives. The new logic is, "I'm dead already. Given that, what's left to lose by fighting back?"

The calculation for someone in a crowd under fire is another matter, because flight (and concealment) remain an option. Survive long enough, and help will come. So the old rules still apply. Get behind something solid. Get out of sight. Be elsewhere.

I suspect there will be some astonishing and agonizing survivor guilt floating around. Let's not add to it with movie-plot fantasies of what people could have done differently.

Group of teens... Check.

Trapped on an island... Check.

Hunted by a crazed gunman... Check

It's even got the feeling that the bombing at Oslo might have been planned as a distraction.

And I think all that is going to change how people think. It's like a movie plot because movie plots are trying to be memorable stories. And movies will take memorable stories from reality. The world is what we remember.

Trouble is, some of the memorable stories are a load of rubbish. How about bombers making a low-level precision attack, at night, by using powerful lights on the 'plane? Or crash-landing aircraft, loaded with soldiers, on top of a key enemy fortress? Crazy stuff like that. Movie plots. Like the time an explosives magazine was in a church, and blew up. Well, that did happen at Almeida in Portugal, but that was 200 years ago and in another country. Nobody is going to do anything like that now.

Movie plots, yeah.

With WHAT?

You know what's really not good for them? Comments like yours.

What's the first rule of holes?

It's true that there are aspects of this that sound like a movie plot. Depending on who they got to make it, could be a blockbuster or straight to video. But it's not, and it's worth remembering that as we discuss the matter.

There are real human beings who woke up to a world without their friends this morning. They're now asking themselves if they could have done anything different to change that. They're asking their friends and their relatives. The parents of those dead kids are wondering, too. I don't know if any of these people, or their family and friends, are reading this thread, but it's not impossible.

And there are more real human beings in the thread who have been in similar situations, and lost friends thereby. One of them is now in a worse state because you started fantasizing about how people could have done things differently.

You want to talk about what aspects of this resemble a movie plot? Sure thing. But it's probably easier to type when you're not waist-deep in that hole.

You're a good bloke. Do a good-bloke thing, willya?

You started out with a 9/11 comparison, which is the problem. The 9/11 hijackers used box cutters, which while painful and capable of doing damage, are nowhere near as dangerous to a potential self -defender as a man with an automatic weapon.

These same sort of hero fantasies were unpacked during the VA Tech shooting, which is closer in similarity to the Oslo attack, where we have one shooter and a lot of unarmed, scared children in a panic stricken state. While it's brave and macho and oh so dramatic to choose the fight impulse over the flight impulse, one gets a lot more people killed.

There's nothing sad or disappointing about a teenager running away from a man with a gun. That's an act that, in a sane world, would be applauded. Alas in our crazy old world, it raises suspicion of insufficient manliness among a certain part of the population who is ill-informed, prone to disingenuous arguments and most tellingly, distant from the scene.

I must start by stating that except for being Norwegian, in Norway and being able to follow the Norwegian media, I am not especially knowledgeable about this, it does seem - at least from some blog comments from that person that have been collected - that he considered parts of Norwegian society to be in regard to what he sees as threats to society a treacherous elite (previously there have been some newspaper stories that have gone on about Utøya Labour Youth Summer Camp being the place where the "spawn" of the present elite coalesce into the future elite, and I do wonder if such newspaper stories have contributed to his madness), and one might conclude that he therefore had a traitors within are worse than external enemies agenda.

From statements made by the suspect, he blamed the Norwegian Government for not doing enough about the immigrant "problem" and so took his ire out on the Gov. rather than any local Muslim community.

(caveat: supposition) Probably, this is a result of looking at the immigrant "problem" as an abstraction. A lot of this guy's rants involve nationalism and a desire for authoritarian responses to the problems of the modern world, so his primary source of frustration is the government that isn't doing it's job, in his view.

Unlike an American Gunman (a type for which we have saddeningly, maddeningly too many examples) our Norwegian gunman comes from a right wing tradition whose authoritarianism is classically centralized. He wants something done and knows exactly who he wants to do it.

Our American Authoritarians, meanwhile, have a displaced sense of authority. They mistrust the Government almost as much as they mistrust Muslims, Liberals, etc. and so go about abstractly demanding that something be done by someone, possibly the incarnation of the Second Amendment in the form of John Wayne's ghost. That's why our homegrown gunmen are usually fringers, distant enough from any mainstream political movement to allow for credible deniability.

I'm a 44 year old adult with some experience with guns. Sitting in my armchair, I'm not too confident I can get the right answers to those questions. In massive confusion about whether theres a crisis and if so what it is, about who the attacker is and what he wants, with no training or expertise in armed combat, I expect I'd probably to the wrong thing pretty reliably. Just like most other mass-shooting victims do, one wa or another. In such a situation, I hope I'd at least remember stuff like cover vs concealment, running short distances at a time and ending behind cover, etc. Expecting me and a bunch of similarly unprepared strangers to spontaneously work out a coordinated attack to save ourselves seems a bit of a stretch. Perhaps if we were all soldiers or ex-soldiers or off-duty policemen or civilians that trained together in armed self-defense, it would work out. But with a random bunch of people?

I think another piece of the problem is a steady diet of movies where being the right kind of person means one can take drastic violent action and reliably get good results.

#63

demanding that something be done by someone, possibly the incarnation of the Second Amendment in the form of John Wayne's ghost.

I've been framing that sort of thing as a lack of sense of process, but snark improves it.

And the tragic fact is, a small number of people who are willing to die to inflict damage can do a hell of a lot of it, and are quite hard to stop. Whether they use guns or bombs or fires or whatever else, most of our defenses against people going out and killing people they don't like, or smashing up stuff, involve deterrence. People who don't care about deterrence are inherently able to bypass those defenses.

This is in Norway, a country of 5 million souls.

92 dead in Norway is ... well, multiply by 60 for the equivalent proportion of Americans and you get over 5000 dead. Playing the numbers game with such a horror is distasteful, but it suggests to me that the political impact on Scandinavian and European anti-terror politics in general is going to be non-trivial to say the least.

This is the neo-Nazi 9/11. Breivik had links to the English Defense League and other racist right-wing groups. The folks who police and intel groups all over the west have been treating with kid gloves, compared to the islamicists, due to the explosive and barely-acknowledged fact that there's wide-scale support for anti-immigrant views all over the west, especially anti-muslim views, and semi-respectable politicians playing these prejudices for personal careerist gain.

It's a poisoned chalice. And I have no idea what this bodes for the future, other than: nothing good.

I suspect there will be some astonishing and agonizing survivor guilt floating around.

I can almost guarantee that there will be really severe survivor guilt among those who were there, and probably among any who weren't there that day but had intended to be. And I suggest that any discussion of what those who died might or might not have done to survive this horror is very inappropriate at this time, even in a venue like this where the survivors are unlikely to see it. It's condescending (we weren't there and don't know the detailed situation; talking about it in that way implies our superiority to those who were there) and arrogant (we are not experts on such situations; there are very few who are, certainly not me), and, IMO, it is distasteful and disrespectful.

We're looking at someone else's 9/11 from the outside.

As 9/11 did, this massacre is going to echo around the world for years. And I feel that it's not disrespectful to the survivors to ask what the impact will be for us.

But I think we should respectfully leave them to their grief and really not speculate about who should have done what at the time. It's not our wound and we're not entitled to lick it.

Now, the fact is, they couldn't have mounted any effective resistance. But after events like that, survivors always torture themselves, trying to figure out what if anything they could have done.

The point about movie plots is more evasive, but I have faith that David will presently pin that one down.

Charlie Stross @ 67: the English Defense League and other racist right-wing groups. The folks who police and intel groups all over the west have been treating with kid gloves, compared to the islamicists,

I suspect the cops and intelligence agencies will be changing their focus a wee bit now.

due to the explosive and barely-acknowledged fact that there's wide-scale support for anti-immigrant views all over the west, especially anti-muslim views, and semi-respectable politicians playing these prejudices for personal careerist gain.

A cleaner election campaign has been forecast for the local and county elections in September. The whole country is, at least for now, standing together.

Keith 61: Alas in our crazy old world, it raises suspicion of insufficient manliness among a certain part of the population who is ill-informed, prone to disingenuous arguments and most tellingly, distant from the scene.

I'm not sure what you...oh! You mean SHITHEADS. I get it now.

albatross 64: Perhaps if we were all soldiers or ex-soldiers or off-duty policemen or civilians that trained together in armed self-defense, it would work out. But with a random bunch of people?

Just so. The problem is that the shitheads assume that the people on the ground could and should behave in ways they (the shitheads) think they would...in hindsight, knowing much more than the actual victims did at the time, and with the training neither group has, and presumably with the fiat of scriptwriters behind them as well.

I think 'shithead' isn't quite bad enough to describe these people, but it has the virtue of brevity.

Bruce 68 and Charlie 69: Yes. Bravo. Hear hear.

Nancy 71: My vague impression is that survivor guilt happens regardless of whether it's at all reasonable. Anyone have actual information on the subject?

No actual data, but in my own case I felt that I should have gone into work early September 11, and that I certainly didn't deserve to live as much as some of the people who died (especially Stacey, who...never mind). Later I actually felt I'd missed an opportunity to die in a way that wasn't my fault. Eventually I just felt like death was stalking me, and would get me if I wasn't constantly hypervigilant.

That's pretty much where I am now.

I felt that the analogy with 9/11, where people should have, and actually did fight back, drew a closer parallel than just guilt.

Lila, PJ Evans, Lee, Anderson, etc, saw the same things in the comment in question.

I am certain that when Dave returns to the thread, he will clarify the matter with his usual grace and compassion, and then all will be well.

Can I get a "so say we all" on that?

Amen and verily.

http://prableen.origo.no/-/bulletin/show/672218_helvete-paa-utoeya

For those of you who can't make heads of tail of Norwegian here's the google translate version of it
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fprableen.origo.no%2F-%2Fbulletin%2Fshow%2F672218_helvete-paa-utoeya

The translation is a bit wonky and goes wrong like automatic translations do but it still gets most of it across.

Don't read it if you're already too upset. It's just.. no one should have to go through what these young people did.

Someone in the comments translated it into English; here is a direct link to the translation.

Very upsetting indeed.

They've been signing a memorial book in support of Norway in Iceland today, there were very long queues. Strong feeling of Nordic solidarity. I'm in Scotland so couldn't go and add my name to it, would have otherwise.

Yeah, it's a larger percentage of the population than 9/11 victims were of the US population. And, since it was a summer camp, it was a) kids and b) kids from all over the country.

Sica @83 and abi @87 -- I have a deep sense that personal accounts of that kind are incredibly important, so that the victims can't be reduced to a number. I know it would be a really, really bad idea for me to read it, so I won't. But Sica, as you say -- no one should have to go through that -- and accounts like that one make people understand what it really was.

My vague impression is that survivor guilt happens regardless of whether it's at all reasonable.

I've read several accounts by survivors of both accidents and combat that agree with that. And it matches my own feelings on hearing of the deaths of friends, and my wife's feelings when she (with Stage 0 cancer) underwent radiation therapy with patients at Stage 3 and 4: she felt that she had no right to be considered in the same class as those others, that she wasn't facing the same kind of potential fate.

I feel that way about my own cancer. But you know what? I've been told by the people at Gilda's Club that EVERYONE feels that way. One of the staff there told me he'd heard that sentiment from someone in the last two weeks of his life.

In Norway the sentencing of a criminal act is split in two, with three different goals
1) Punishment. A maximum 21 years in jail.
2) Preventive deterrent. which probably doesn't come into play here.
3) Protecting the society from the perpetrator. A maximum of 21 years in "detention" initially, but will be renewed ad infinitum every 5 years if deemed necessary.

Also, why can't they sentence him to 21 years for each person he killed? Do prison sentences all have to run concurrently?

Muslims are monolithic, but crazy christians are individual actors.

I've been doing a lot of writing on this More ways bad intel corrupts

Dave Bell, re 51: No. Very different. Not to beat up on you, but I saw the same thing said after Virginia Tech. To take out an armed person, when on is unarmed requires being able to deal with the weapon. If the weapon is a gun, it takes luck, or co-ordination.

Albatross, at 64 has the right of a lot of it. I've been in ambush training (well done, at night, when; what a shock, we weren't expecting it). It was chaos. Utter chaos.

I was a fire team leader. It took me an age (about one magazine, 30 rounds... and that's how I was measuring time... how many bullets I was putting out) befire I remembered that my job was to direct fire, not shoot. One of my guys dove the "wrong way". When he started shooting, I shot at him.

At a guess... if it had been live ammo, most of us would have died. And we were trained, and armed.

Surprise is a bitch.

And I can't imagine what I'd do if I were in that sort of spot, and not armed.

And now that I have this cumbersome thing I have no idea what exactly to do with it or what it means. I guess it's a grid of possible reactions when something terrible happens to someone else? I'll just sit and look at it for a while and hope it starts to make sense.

(Me and my 15-yo dd, who is just back from camp, so my imaginings last night and today have been, well, fairly vivid and detailed.)

I can imagine what you'd do. Same thing as me. Seek cover and concealment, call 9-1-1, then assess the situation to determine if it would be better to shelter in place or scram out of there.

But all things being equal, cover and cower is the most likely thing.

What that account makes me think of is Malmédy

There are just no words. I know I've been holding my sproglet a little closer today than usual.

I'm an observant Lutheran, so these kids will be in our prayers tomorrow.

This was a political act: The camp wasn't just any old summer camp, but a retreat and training camp for young Labour Party activists. The current Norwegian PM went there himself in the '70s.

Anyone know if that's really how it works?

Also, why can't they sentence him to 21 years for each person he killed? Do prison sentences all have to run concurrently?

IANAL, but trying to decipher the mess that is the penal code, the max is two consecutive sentences - for two different crimes. So assuming he gets separate sentences for murder and terrorism, it's 42 years that can then be extended indefinitely.

But there's no way in hell he's ever getting out. He shot up a camp of future members of parliament and government ministers. They won't forget. _We_ won't forget.

Anyone know if that's really how it works?

Also, why can't they sentence him to 21 years for each person he killed? Do prison sentences all have to run concurrently?

The US-style cumulative sentencing is almost completely absent on this side of the ocean, and every so often taken as an example of how bizarre your penal code can get if you don't keep an eye out while legislating… The absence of 400-year sentencing is, at least in Sweden, generally considered a feature and not a bug.

What is the difference? 9/11 or OKC, the Sari Club or Madrid, Port Arthur or this? Means, perhaps. Scale. Nothing more. I can't see how the exact motive matters.

The means make the scale possible, that's one fact. Automatic firearms; civil aircraft with four hundred passengers; the internet; cell phones. What do we make of that? I don't know.

But I know this: sooner or later we come to Lenin's question: "What is to be done?"

We should, hard as us is to say, rejoice that we grieve. 50 years ago this would have been a different sort of shock. 100 years ago a very different one. 200, not a shock at all, just an odd bit of news.

That we are horrified speaks of how we, as human beings, have progressed. Maybe it's the internet, maybe it's television, but we are more aware of the people at the other end of the world than we used to be. Not as abstractions; though there is that, but as people, with loves, lives, dreams and doubts.

The last ten years have been trying; and one might forget how it was better then. It will get better again.

Because we are stubborn bastards, and we know there are people at the other end of the wire.

Dave Luckett, when something similar happened at Port Arthur in Australia in 1996, our conservative government enacted legislation banning all semi-automatic rifles and all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and a tightly restrictive system of licensing and ownership controls.The government bought back all such weapons over a 12 month period. Since that time there has not been a mass shooting in Australia.

I say this not to start a gun law debate, but to indicate that some things can be done. In some countries.

The nut's manifesto is now online, 1500 pages of wild conspiracy theories written over nine years by a guy who considered himself a member of the Knights Templar.

I saw on the news earlier that the police made an armed operation against a house this morning and arrested six people, and they say it's connected to the attacks.

On the other hand, he posted updates to it -- I think the "1500 page manifesto" bit may be misidentification of a blog, and the Unabomber thing just a part of it -- and the most recent entries are chilling.

It's an angle that hasn't really come up yet: but I think there may be yet more trawling of the internet for advance warning of similar threats in future.

Most of the thing turns out to be plagiarized from the Unabomber manifesto. Is there _no end_ to his crimes?

Anyone who points out his right-wing nationalism and you are "ignoring leftist violence.

His manifesto is just going to be used as grist to the mill of, "the lone wolf" while ignoring the things which motivate all those lone wolves to act in similar fashion.

Maybe he just didn't think it through fully: An important realisation about uniform insignia.

Thanks-- that was a great clip.

The best comment was to the effect that maybe they should be marching under an ancient symbol of peace, love, and harmony-- like a swastika.

I heard some folks on NPR speculating with great solemnity this morning about the shooter's mental health, as if a professional diagnosis could somehow make things better, or worse. I had to turn the radio off; it made me so angry.

I think it's usually just called victim blaming. Very very common in sexual assault cases (you wouldnt have been assaulted if you'd only worn more modest clothing, carried a gun and been escorted by a male relative!! Etc)

the blog source that’s probably cited the most throughout Breivik’s book is Jihad Watch, run by anti-Muslim demagogue Robert Spencer; Breivik cites Robert Spencer more than 40 times, always approvingly.

And a very large number — more than three dozen — of the lengthy articles reprinted in the book are the work of the anonymous white nationalist blogger “Fjordman,” who apparently gave Breivik permission to use them.

Back in the day, I linked to Fjordman’s articles myself; he was a big self-promoter and would email and ask for links every time he posted something. But sometime around 2007 (when I criticized him and other “counter-jihad” bloggers for making deals with extreme right wing European groups) it became clear that his seeming erudition and extreme logorrhea was a cover for a particularly nasty form of European white nationalism.

Of course, the stumble here is good questions. The bigger hurdle is what to do with it once developed and calibrated.

But the other corners are odd -- one would be blatant projection, while the other would be even stranger -- some sort of self-martydom ("we sinners are duly punished") that I'd expect to see sprayed outward from one of the crazier pulpits.

That's obviously a deficient argument. It's clear that his particular version of christianity is stirred into the stew, but I'm not agile enough to make that point at the same time I'm trying to emphasize what matters. Any advice is welcome.

I publicly resigned from the site the moment Fjordman started posting the sort of rants that made it very clear he was some kind of white supremacist, because I didn't my own writing tainted by association.

Still amazes me that Eric Olsen failed to see through the guy and realise what he was.

I think it's a mistake to act as if all claims tying an individual's actions to a movement's rhetoric are equally valid--or invalid, as the case may be. The important consideration is, is there a link between the rhetoric of the group in question and the individual's motivation? Sometimes there is a clear and unambiguous connection, and sometimes it's evident that the shooter's bowling league wasn't a determining factor.

Actually Chernyshevsky's question, and he was a far more admirable human being than Lenin (low bar tho that be).

This is very predictable; and I wonder how people here feel about that. It's not an entirely simple question.

One of the more unpleasant things I've seen on this isn't the people saying, "he's not like us, I don't care what parallels there might be," as much as the one's I've seen (specifically some anti-feminists) who said, "well the way "x" group has ruined the world of course someone finally snapped and tried to do something about it."

Probably not. At least from my point of view, the idea fails to pass the "How would things work out if this tool were in the hands of my enemies?" test.

I think in a wake, the participants help each other arrive at a new, changed world where something was lost. Today perhaps half a million people reassured each other that, in fact, nothing need be lost. What's-his-name certainly managed to unite the people here, just not in the way he had dreamed of.

As if we needed further evidence that Glenn Beck is a scumbag of the filthiest water.

alex 175: How clever of you to fix that problem.

Those terms are simplistic and narrow. There's lots of right-wing thought that isn't actually f*sc*st. For example, there are Randroids who count as far right by any reasonable standard (even if they're True Scotsmen!), but aren't into the Great Man theory with the uniforms and the very strict everything-not-required-is-forbidden society.

Fascism, OTOH, is a real, home-grown European ideology that hasn't gone away for about 100 years now [yes, it had started before WW1, if you know where to look]; so actually, no, it isn't 'simplistic and narrow' unless you've got a simplistic and narrow definition of 'fascism' in your own mind.

Of course, at another level, most fascists these days are probably diagnosable at some level; but that doesn't actually help. Any more than it does with Randroids, survivalists, Militiamen, et al.

May none of us ever need to do such a thing again.

Peace to you and yours.

Thank you.

And if "stochastic terrorism" hasn't been mentioned yet, it should be. It's a remarkable concept, and one that apparently holds for both sides of the Atlantic.

But it leads down a rabbit hole.

Life will go on.

I very much hope he, the mass murder, has ample opportunity to explain at length and in public exactly why he did what he did. I want him to cite the theories that motivate him, the bloggers whose rhetoric animates him, the organizations he feels solidarity with. Let him tell us himself what causes he has stained with the blood of children. I am sure the propaganda will have just the outcome he yearned for.

Thank you.

He's done that in writing. His court appearance was kept behind closed doors, (officially) so he wouldn't be able to send coded messages to any accomplices. (Unofficially, I don't think they wanted to give him a pulpit. And as the judge allegedly had to interrupt him, they were right.)

I am sure the propaganda will have just the outcome he yearned for.

Bugger that. Let him rot in a cell. Let him spend the rest of his life watching his grandiose dreams (or, as us "cultural marxists" may think of them, delusions) come to nothing, as his silly uniforms rot and we build a working society.

As a foot soldier, for that full-blown golden-age-of-struggle-against-the-Turk experience.

Dress him up in his costume, give him a sword, and parachute him into a war zone in Somalia or Yemen.

Except sometimes in our capacities as storytellers, we are not elves, to punish bad people with a poisonous dose of what they want; and I'll venture that we're the better for it. Maybe sometimes, even in our stories?

But I believe that Norway is getting it right in the matter of mordant justice too, in that knocking his silly hat off and trying him as a dull wicked butcher will be much less to his taste. Some criminals are more sternly, as well as more justly, dealt with in prose.

No poetry for this nothing man.

No poetry for this nothing man.

But seriously, I get your point and am in total agreement with it.

--Dave, got here late

Frankly, I don't care how publicizing his beliefs makes him feel: he has fallen outside my community of care. Denying him attention to spite his delusions of grandeur is just as blinkered as any other petty vengeance we might extract from his flesh. My argument is that letting him speak for himself, shining the light of society on the malignancy he represents, is the best way forward towards building a working society as you put it. Acting as if he is a common criminal, however satisfying that might be, is dangerously wrong. He is not simply a criminal: he has committed a hate crime, and the effects go beyond just the despair and destruction he wrought. He chose ideological targets for ideological reasons, and that ought not be ignored, no more than the racist ideology of the KKK ought to be ignored.

He is toxin to be purged. You cannot purge what you refuse to see.

He has spoken already, and we are shining the light on it.

Acting as if he is a common criminal, however satisfying that might be, is dangerously wrong. He is not simply a criminal

As Steve with a book points out, don't turn him into a soldier. He is a terrorist, a vile criminal with no honour. Treat him like one.

He is toxin to be purged. You cannot purge what you refuse to see.

We see it well.

I'm doing a slow burn -- the perp calls himself a Knight Templar, and last time I looked that did have a Christian affiliation.

Not that I believe he's a real member of that organization.

That sounds exactly like what I heard/read from various Muslims after 9/11--these guys weren't Muslims, because mass murder wasn't in keeping with Muslim beliefs. And no doubt in both cases, it's true--certainly it's not easy to find a lot of support for mass murder or war or terrorism in the New Testament, for all that there have been plenty of self identified Christians who've murdered and terrorized strangers.

a. We're almost always better off being able to see more of what government agencies, police, courts, prosecutors, etc., are doing, which means we benefit from having everything done out in the open.

b. We really, really don't want to offer every wacko in the world the opportunity to have a few days of nationwide airtime and public attention paid to his ideas if he's only willing to shed enough blood.

c. The expressed ideas of a terrorist may or may not be his real beliefs, and may or may not tell us much about their value. I very much dislike the routine where someone from group X does some nasty thing, and then people who don't like group X use this as evidence that group X is a force for evil in the world, should be banned or spied on or deported, etc. I find this no more convincing when applied to far right terrorists than when applied to Muslim terrorists.

I think the focus over here more has been on emphasising that criminal acts are crimes, since it seems that one part of his fantasy is to pose in court as a captured skirmisher or advance scout from an army, and it seems that the courts have also wanted to deny him this or any other pretense to any mantle of martyrdom or something similar.

Lori @ 204:

It does seem that he has a peculiar approach to Christianity, as some reports on the manifesto state that he describes himself as belonging to a cagory of persons that do not believe themselves, but believe in the traditional forms and institutions of Christianity (as he preceives them, of course). So I do understand why some Christian friends do find it difficult to see him describes as Christian, when he apparently does not have faith.

I'm guessing Peter Crossman wouldn't recognize him as a colleague, either.

Five days after an attacker incensed by Norway's culture of tolerance horrified the world, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday issued a quiet call of defiance to his countrymen: Make Norway even more open and accepting.

I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure it's right. To me, "victim blaming" involves more than the denoted blaming-of-a-victim; there's usually a connotation that the person doing so is placing the blame in such a way as to free themselves from a burdensome truth they would otherwise have to acknowledge. (For instance, "That could have been me that happened to" - or "That could have been me who made that happen".)

The blame I'd imagined the survivor assigning wasn't so much "you caused this terrible thing," but "you survived this terrible thing (how dare you?)"

You could argue that the truth people with survivor's guilt wish to escape is that sometimes people live or die for no good reason at all, but I'm not sure if I want to pick up that banner and run with it--both because I'm not fully convinced it's a workable theory and also, more importantly, because I can imagine it being offensive to people of faith, including our hosts.

It might be interesting to know if survivor's guilt is more or less common among any given groups.

I think this goes more aptly in the other direction -- that people who are seriously invested in the idea that "everything happens for a reason" may be more susceptible, as a group, to survivor's guilt, but other people can still suffer from it for different reasons.

But I tended to avoid reports with detail, after the first couple of days. The reporting had fixed on people who were hiding, and how the killer came so incredibly close without seeing them. It seemed as though the media had settled on the story they could tell. Maybe there was a different emphasis in Norway, and this is about how people could do something active and make a difference. It's a different viewpoint.

As I told my partner when I saw it, it doesn't make it better--but it makes a difference for those few families.

Damn them.

Having said my (mostly off-topic for this) comment in the OT (because of course there wouldn't be a specific thread for this here, and I shouldn't go looking for one), I'll be quieter here, except that I, too, applaud the "we aren't going to give this criminal what he wants, either as a pulpit or by allowing this to change what's good about our society". We shall see if that sentiment continues in the face of all the people who stand to gain from instilling "When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" - but I think it shall.

"The ordinary citizen's safety lies in statistics, not in ever more elaborate 'security' measures. You are still more likely to die from falling off a ladder or drowning in the bath than you are to die in a terrorist attack. When they tell you to re-shape your life or your foreign policy in response to the 'terrorist threat', tell them to go jump in the lake." - the conclusion of this week's Gwynne Dyer column.

...Which doesn't affect the horror I feel at what happened or my sympathy for the survivors and families, of course.

Yup, it's the time-bomb torture apologists, crawling out of the woodwork. I have been posting firefighting posts on my local sceptics forum, claiming the guilt/innocence divide is invalid, and stressing informed vs ignorant and that the latter category includes our terrorist, and also the CIA interrogation manuals. I think I may have won this debate, but one thing I failed to find was a good index to Terry Karney's writings on the subject and other resources for the next time. Does anyone know where to find them?

No evidence of the real existence of the groups he claimed to belong to or know of ever surfaced. Had they been real, something would have turned up over the subsequent forty years.

Torturing him for that information would have produced figments of his imagination, not useful data.

Back in the days of the Dirty War in Argentina, the way it worked was this: A person would be arrested for being a left-wing anti-government terrorist. That person would be tortured to reveal his or her accomplices. The accomplices would be arrested, and, under torture, would admit to being left-wing anti-government terrorists. This validated the original information. They would then be tortured to reveal the names of their accomplices, who would then be arrested ....

It was perfectly self-sustaining, and validated at every step of the way, with information gained under torture supporting other information gained by torture.

Whether you're looking for confessions of terrorism or confessions of witchcraft, torture always works. In nearly 100% of the cases, it provides confessions. (Exception: The folks who die under torture before they have a chance to confess.) What it doesn't provide is valid confessions.

Jim Macdonald: Indeed. Breivik shows the same pattern of inventing his own facts. What the apologists were proposing, however, was investigating the claims obtained through torture with proper policework, which made it slightly harder to argue: proper testing is the gold standard of science, and hypothetical corruption of the police force is difficult to claim without data. We have had past cases where poor policework got false convictions. The still unveiling "Thomas Quick" cases, where a man through psychiatric coercion apparently confessed to multiple murders in nearly all of che Nordic countries, making several separate teams of officers fail to recognise the falsity of the confession (in one case apparently misidentifying wood as bone), which suggests that ordinary policework might not be sufficient to falsify confessions.

Do we have any data on police forces abandoning proper work when coercion enters the picture?

With no intel, you don't know, and you know you don't know. With bad intel you still don't know, but you don't know it.