Just a quick update on Eivind Berge: According to this news account, the Norwegian Men’s Rights blogger is considered enough of a threat to police officers that his two-week detention has been extended by four more weeks. According to the prosecutor, the “risk of recurrence of new criminal offenses” makes releasing him dangerous.
See my posts here and here for more on his arrest.
Looks that way. And yeah, thunderstorms are the best.
There’s this low spot in my driveway, and if rains hard enough this huge puddle forms, and sometimes ducks start swimming in it. 🙂
I love the way that a thread discussing a vile™ apologist for rape and murder has turned into a chat about the weather.
Wetherby: That’s part of why I fell in love with Manboobz, the non-troll derails are the best. 😀
Dracula: Aww, ducks are awesome. Sometimes in the spring, there’s a trio of ducks that come around here (a female and her two male friends, has to be some misandry involved there! Either that or they’re Nice Ducks ™ and she’s quack-zoned them). The puddles don’t get deep enough to swim in, but they love them anyway.
One of my cats, on the other hand, does not. But watching her try to navigate the driest parts so she doesn’t get her little pawsies wet is hilarious. 😀
We live on a pond, so we never want for ducks around here. Mostly Mallards, but we get Buffleheads in the winter.
There’s also loads of Canadian geese, swans, sometimes seagulls, and the occasional cormorant or heron. It’s brackish water, close to the ocean, hence the sea birds.
There was just a shooting at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater during the midnight showing of Dark Knight Rises. I am sure a lot of people in the US who are awake have seen some news of it. No motivations are available yet, or information on who the person is. He wasn’t on a watch list, so maybe there were no warning signs. still it would be nice to support when police can prevent senseless tragedy rather than wait until after a horrific crime has been committed.
Damn, this is first I’m hearing of this.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-shooting-colorado-movie-theater-14-people-dead/story?id=16817842 is one article I’ve read. Note there is a video that automatically plays. CN for violence. I am in Korea but I am from Aurora so I am anxiously trying to get a hold of my friends, many of whom saw it opening night and some of whom may have been at that theater.
I hope your friends are okay.
So far so good :). Sorry this is getting on another subject, but I thought it was somewhat related. Unstable and violent people usually show signs. If the cops can apprehend them before they carry out their violent fantasy it is better for everyone. Don’t know that this event could have been prevented (if the suspect had online rants or threats etc).. If he did, I’d be angry something wasn’t done. The risk of people carrying out their violent words is very real.
At the moment you’re only interrupting a conversation about ducks, so don’t worry about it.
@Freitag: I’m a northern import (the fact that Texas had such a huge growth in the past two decades from outside is because the state has the lowest percentage of adults 25 and under with high school degrees/GED and also the lowest percentage of adults with college degees)–been here for 19 years.
It’s getting better in some ways (40% voted for Obama, mostly in the cities), but you have to admit that the Republican hegemony here is pretty dedicated to underfunding education, overfunding prisons, sub-contracting out state services to Big Bidnesses to run badly, and putting out platforms that are against teaching critical thinking and for the gold standard.
The people, as opposed to the thugs running the state institutions, are as all people varied–I’m in a poor rural county with horrible health care, few social services, and major lack of jobs outside the service sector–and yet am still astounded by how many of my students are conservatives–and fundamentalists (town of 7800, 45 churches).
But Texas is not uniquely horrible: these days Arizonia, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and a few other southern states are right there in the running.
Rick Perry’s trying to force universities to offer $10,000 college degrees is only the most recent tip of the absolute idiocy that is public education in Texas.
It’s far more on-topic than the OP!
But I’m really not sure what the solution is, given that only a few days ago film critics were being sent death threats for having the temerity to pan a film that the people sending the threats hadn’t even seen! Should every single person who did this have been arrested? Or would such a large-scale action have been more likely to trigger unintended consequences?
Still, at least the suspect has been apprehended, and in situations like this the suspect usually is the guy who did it (given the accompanying evidence) – so we might actually get some insight into his motivation.
Oh, and fingers crossed for your friends at this end, too.
Sorry, completely mangled that sentence – I meant to write “it’s far more on-topic than most of the last few posts!”
thoughts going out to all the USians. Hugs from Australia.
@Wetherby, that really depends what we find out. The ABC news story already had the obligatory ‘we don’t know yet if this is Islamic terrorism’ scare quote… i.e., already pointing fingers.
If he turns out to be somebody who was posting violent fantasies online for quite some time… for whatever reason… then we can start second-guessing about whether we’re paying enough attention to folks doing that.
At this point, who knows?
The suspect’s name is James Holmes, aged 24.
Which doesn’t of course rule out Islamist terrorism, but it makes it appreciably less likely.
what I have read and watched indicates that the police/ investigators do not think this has to do with Islamic terrorism. To be honest given the area I would suspect racial motivations if anything, but I hesitate to throw out theories without any information.
I don’t think everyone who makes threats are equal by any means, but it makes sense to take seriously when people make repeated, documented and specific threats like Berge does/ did. Can’t catch everyone that way, but I don’t believe that free speech covers violent threats.
The alleged shooter had at least four weapons on him or in a vehicle and the door to his apartment seems to be booby-trapped. The story says “four weapons recovered,” and it doesn’t seem like the cops have breached his apartment yet, so I think it safe to say he was carrying them or had them nearby, probably in a car or truck.
But hey, requiring people to prove that they know how to handle dangerous things safely by qualifying for a government license is merely rent-seeking behavior on the part of Big Daddy so they can fine you when you don’t play along, amirite?
I completely agree. Berge had been posting implicit and explicit anti-police threats for years before his arrest – and a sensible reaction to the Breivik massacre would have been to tone down the violent rhetoric.
Instead, he openly praised him, almost to the point of sounding jealous of his achievement, and consciously exploited the notoriety that resulted from being a pro-Breivik Norwegian. One particularly telling detail is that his blog attracted far more Norwegian commenters after 22 July 2011 than it ever did before.
No police force worthy of the name can ignore something like that – and if they find material evidence that suggests that Berge was capable of physically carrying out his threat, they were pretty much obliged to investigate. And the fact that his detention in remand has been extended (and tripled) from the original two-week period suggests that they’re taking his threats very seriously indeed.
(Note that none of the above needed to refer to Berge’s initial notoriety as an outspoken and unambiguous rape apologist – amazingly, this seems to be the least controversial thing about him!)
And I just read that there was an explosive device found in the theater?
Agh.
And throwing out the ‘no word if it’s an Islamic terrorist yet!’ line is a way of putting that on your mind. Not ‘no way to know if it’s a right-wing skinhead!’ ‘No way to tell if it’s a men’s right activist!’
It’s framing (not ‘framing the suspect,’ ‘framing your mental picture’). There was a lot of that speculation when the Norway shooting happened. It’s a way of saying ‘I expect those brown people to be violent.’
And given what we know about terrorism in America and how much more right-wing terrorism there’s been here? Yeah. Starting out with that framing is …problematic. Reality-denying.
I heard about this story this morning on the radio (news on the BBC). 🙁 Hopefully the people injured will make full recoveries.
It does seem that whenever there’s a mass killing or some sort of bomb threat, they always wheel out the old Islamic terrorist thing.. And then completely drop any mention of “terrorism” entirely when the person involved turns out not to be a Muslim, even if technically the event fits the definition of “terrorism” (not that it looks like it applies in this case, though we don’t know the guy’s motivations yet).
I think that’s part of the reason those things keep happening, people just ignore any terrorism that’s not Islamic in nature and dismiss the idea that it’s part of a pattern.
And as long as we’re poking at questionable lines in that ABC link, I noticed a weird one that now looks like it got edited out in the update. It was something along the lines of “the authorities can’t say how many of those killed and injured were women and children”.. that line made me go: o.O
Note of pedantic exactitude. The name of the birds is Canada Goose/Geese, not Canadian. We don’t know where they live, only where they are. 🙂
One reason you shouldn’t move to Canada. Geese can hurt you badly. And they wander all over Quebec City smoking tiny cigarettes and being bored with things.
Stay down here with the bears and the coyotes and the crocodiles. At least they won’t sneer at you before they mess you up.
/silly
I was menaced by a Canada goose once! I was walking along the riverwalk to work, and saw a nest, and a mama goose, and some goslings, fairly new, clearly, and was standing there oohing and aahing when Daddy Goose came toward me with clear intent to defend his family from this two legged predator.
I retreated quickly and respectfully….
Shade: Yeah. The majority of terrorists in the US are white, male, Conservative, Christian (of a “fundamentalist” stripe).
When they do things like offer to sell bombs full of sodium cyanide; and get caught before they able to get those to the hands of the activist extremists, they are ignored. When they do something like Eric Rudolph’s campaign of terror, they are, “lone wolves”, or, “disturbed individuals”. The underlying support network (Rudolph wasn’t living in the woods for three years on nuts and berries), and the drumbeats of encouragement (anyone seen a, “Liberal Hunting License? I have), are brushed off as, “people letting off steam”, or given a False Equivalence (the SLA, or Ted Kaczinski).
Then, if God Forbid, one ever says that, push come to shove, they will resist someone who wants to actually kill them, they are violently unhinged, because everyone knows the only real Terrorists are the Timothy McVeighs, of the world, but the mad brown people who hate our freedom.
Gah.