Christchurch mosque shootings, 49 dead; one shooter livestreamed his attack: Open thread

Christchurch, BTW, has like 350,000 people. This is in a city about the size of Honolulu. I can’t imagine how overwhelmed their law enforcement teams must be.

And I’m thinking about the LEOs because I can’t bear to think too hard about the dead and their families this early in the fucking morning.

@ Nequam:

I’m still disturbed that I feel less surprised that it happened at all than I do that it happened in NZ and not the US.

there’ll be a copycat here in short order…

it’s gonna be a long, hot summer….

What is wrong with this world

@Diego Duarte:

At which point is it fucking acceptable to fight back?

I think it’s acceptable and necessary to fight back at every step. However, I do think we need to be careful both strategically & tactically. The manifesto seems to me, from what little I’ve read, to be intended to create overreactions. The writer talks not only about being radicalized by Candace Owens, but about being trained to violence by video games. The writer seems to think that if society overreacts by banning too many things, deplatforming too many people, that the suddenness and obviousness of the loss of certain media (and other) freedoms will trigger broader violence.

I … and I know how stupid this sounds … actually have more faith in the right wing than that. I know that paranoia is rampant. I know that racism and sexism and religious bigotry are rampant. And yet, with over 300 million people, there are only a few a year willing to engage in terrorism.

A few a year is exactly one few too many, of course, but when a third of voters stand by this fucked up president, it becomes important to note the ratio between millions of right wingers and the few who commit terrorism.

So, yeah, we have to act every single day. We don’t have to wait, and I don’t think most of us are waiting: even pushing back against everyday racism in your conversations with family or co-workers is doing something. But we need a broader strategy, one that anticipates and accounts for the dangers posed by the few terrorists without actually focussing on the terrorists. Conceding that terrorism is inevitable is not the way to go about this. Conceding that the NZ terrorists are correct that deplatforming Candace Owens will launch a war is stupid. But there are going to continue to be places of radicalization, and pushing more people into them doesn’t help us either.

None of this is to say I know the answers. But I’m confronted by the complexity of the problem: we cannot do nothing. To do so is to tolerate this racist, religious terrorism. On the other hand, we must choose our next steps carefully so as to not increase violence.

It’s the old problem of eradication vs. harm reduction. If I had to choose between one more terror attack tomorrow that kills another 50 people but then no more terror attacks forever, OR safety tomorrow but another 50 people dying every year, forever, it would be hard to justify not increasing the violence temporarily in exchange for long term safety.

But we never know: we never know exactly what we’re doing, and when we take actions that might increase risk, we’re rarely the people who suffer directly when that risk manifests.

So we get paralyzed, not wanting to do anything for fear that the writer’s predictions will come true and that we’ll overreact and create more violence. But while the idea that we might bear the burden of moral responsibility for the next flash of violence is terrifying, we can’t allow us to stop fighting.

This isn’t about starting the fight, this is about mustering the courage to lock arms and step forward again, knowing the Dharasana guards are going to strike at us.

If it helps, the moral responsibility for violence is always on those who act violently.

We can do this.

We must do this.

Jummah Mubarak and solidarity any Muslim mammotheers.

Tomorrow there will be events across the world to mark UN Anti Racism day; I will be stewarding at the London one, and we will have a moment’s silence for the victims.

London March

These horrible attacks make demonstrations of solidarity more important, so I would ask anybody who is able to see if there is an event near them to attend.

Dear gods, this is horrendous. Condolences to the families of the victims.

@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs:

The writer did blame video games.

And I don’t think the manifesto writer was trolling in merely suggesting that the writer liked or followed Owens. Rather, if you read it (and it would be wise not to, but if you do) you would find that the writer actually said that Owens was more radical than the writer – who purports to be the shooter or one of the shooters. The writer insists it was necessary to disavow the most radical parts of Owens’ rhetoric because Owens was too radical even for this writer who was intending mass murder.

There were also other statements about expecting/hoping that a war would result if freedoms were curtailed as a reaction to this terrorist act. Although that’s only explicit text in relation to gun control & the 2nd amendment in the US (yes, the writer mentioned the US specifically), if that is the hope and expectation, then there’s no reason for them not to try to encourage infringement of other rights (real or imagined) to help radicalize the right wing and bring about their hoped-for war.

So…

my guess is that the most reasonable interpretation of the statements about Owens is that the writer is indeed shitposting, exaggerating the effect and role of Owens in the hope of getting Owens banned from one or more major social media platforms in the ultimate hope of encouraging more terrorism and war.

If this is his goal, given a right-wing world view, blaming things on Clinton wouldn’t work and thus wouldn’t be part of the writer’s strategy. After all, the writer probably believes
1) there’s a double standard that protects anyone on the left from being banned, and
2) the right would simply laugh if Clinton were banned from social media, rather than respond with violence.

Curiously, this implicitly recognizes that the right wing doesn’t care about “rights”. They care about right wing voices dominating the conversation; they don’t care about a generic “right” to free expression.

But whatever. The point is that trolling by exaggerating Owens’ rhetoric, role, and effect is actually quite consistent with aims stated in other portions of the document, while trolling by blaming Clinton is not.

@AsAbove: I tried to call Anning’s office to tell him off, but my mobile phone account can only make domestic calls as it turns out.

The thing is, just because 4channers mock the notion that they’ve been radicalized by the internet, doesn’t mean that they weren’t radicalized by the internet. Deplatforming Nazis is not an overreaction, it’s something that should have been done years ago.

There’s a couple books I read that helped me understand the white supremacist mentality… not justify, mind you, but understand. They were “Angry White Men” by Michael Kimmel, and “Bring the War Home” by Katherine Belew. They both give a comprehensive treatment of where the (mostly) fascist tendencies come from, what the strategic and tactical goals are, and what their methods are. They are also very disturbing.

After the 80’s FBI sting operations and the NAACP lawsuits crippled the Identity Movement and the Klan’s finances, the right-wing leaders started advocating “unorganized resistance”, i.e. a systematic dismantle of the top-down structure in favor of a “you know who to hit, just do it” program… no leaders, at least not leadership to which a chain of command can be traced.

It’s a proxy war, where the proxies are random internet surfers, alt-radio listeners, just pretty much the whole of the igno-right. Incidents like the N.Z. massacre will embolden the igno-rightie who is already on the edge, and they (he… they’re ALWAYS “he”) will pick up a gun, make a few pipe bombs etc. and here we are.

It’s not militarily efficient, and hitting a particular target is more difficult, or it requires the people who want the target hit to do it themselves. They can ask/order some shock jock, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Mike Cernovich, etc. to say on the air that the target needs taken out, but that exposes that person to litigation, and opens the possibility of betrayal of others…. Depends on how bad the “movers and shakers” want the target hit.

Diego and Crip Dyke have asked about fighting. I dunno, I’m too old and cynical to believe we’re gonna lock arms and take down the fascists, but, yeah, there’s a good chance we might be fighting. If the dumpster-fire gets re-elected, the legal and social position of all oppressed peoples is gonna get really bad. If, alternatively, he doesn’t get re-elected, the igno-right will likely step up the terrorism. If, in the worst scenario, he loses and refuses to step down, then we’re fighting on election night.

There’s an alternate universe in which this all just blows over, and the igno-right is socially repudiated, but I’m afraid we don’t live in that universe. That would require a moment of clarity from 60 million people who are currently comfortable believing that the world is controlled by a huge multi-national Jewish cabal financed by the lost treasure of the Knights Templar.

In a little bit of good news on the mass shooting front….

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/sandy-hook-connecticut-supreme-court-guns-nra-remington.html

Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA)… prohibits… marketing a product in an unfair, unethical, or dangerous manner

Remington’s advertisements for the AR-15–style weapon ran afoul of CUTPA by promoting unethical and illegal use of the weapon. Their lawsuit cited multiple ads that depicted the gun not as a tool of home defense, hunting, or sport, but as a weapon of war meant to kill a large number of people in a small amount of time. Remington advertised the gun as “the ultimate combat weapons system” used by the armed forces in theaters of war. It depicted a close-up of the gun with the slogan “Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.” It touted the weapon as an “uncompromising choice” with “military proven performance.” As the Connecticut Supreme Court explained, the thrust of Remington’s ads was that the gun would “enable a shooter to inflict unparalleled carnage.”

(all emphasis mine)

I have no doubt the Reagan/trump court (formerly known as SCOTUS) will overrule this, but you never know. At some point the mega-wealthy may get nervous about the safety of the shoppers in their market-driven universe….

Where Remington may have fucked up is civilian advertisements selling a civilian rifle TO civilian buyers TOUTING HOW MANY PEOPLE IT COULD KILL AND HOW QUICKLY….

Seems relevant:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/do-the-christchurch-shootings-expose-the-murderous-nature-of-ironic-online-fascism