Why is Boston 'terrorism' but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine?

[Pogo]

That's it --- a "perverse power position," as you say. I'm desperate to find explanatory concepts because we are certainly in an epidemic of these actions and until we have a name, concepts, we cannot think about this problem in any way that makes sense. We are in danger of politicizing something that isn't about politics, perhaps. God knows we've got troubles enough with Muslims rising around the world, but this feels different even when sometimes Muslims DO it.

Have you gotten into video game playing? I have, many hours a week, what can I say. I don't play the male first person shooters like Halo, but I'm playing Assassin's Creed II right now, 55 hours in, and there's a LOT of non-gun violence. It's very, very seductive. Tremendously addictive. I particularly like throwing knives at the roof guards or assassinating using the poison dagger (women's weapon is poison, they say.......). It's training, it's desensitization, I can feel it.

Sure, "perverse power position" is a good term for what I feel and what maybe these mad bombers and shooters feel in real life. Now, I'm not, pray God, ever going to take this feeling of power into real life, unless I'm attacked in my home, but I do think it has a psychological effect, just as Army training does.

I agree, it must have a psychological effect. No, I don't do games virtually at all. Never got the attraction of them. I'll do a word game or a card game but never been interested in that kind. I rarely go to movies at all because I can't sit and ingest violence, even when it's acted. I'm still haunted by a scene I happened across that somebody else was watching on TV when I walked into the hotel room I was sharing, twenty years ago. So that guy was already desensitized enough to sit and watch it. He probably doesn't even remember the scene- it was maybe 30 seconds. But it's still with me.

We get the death culture thrown at us from every angle every day; war, assaults, TV shows, movies, even our dominant religion, which impales a man on a cross. It's inevitable that we get desensitized when we've disconnected ourselves from our own spirit and live on the emotional angst fantasies that inevitably make money for somebody somewhere.

Not about making money but more so about how it's being spent (explain better at the end). Its really more so about this world, and the way that it has been in condition of, and is still in the same condition of right now as we speak, otherwise ever since the Garden of Eden we have seen these things now.. Remember the story of Adam and Eve, and how they were innocent as you wish that you were in life in this post, not knowing the bad things, but only the good things? Well when the serpent beguiled Eve and had her eat from the tree of "knowledge", to then know all things Good & evil, and then she went and had Adam do the same, well here we are till this very day, and it is the very reason we have the good Lord's sacrifice that was made in love for us by his own will in doing so, where as it was the only way to redeem us from our sinful knowledge in which we all have gained upon that day, and it was done in order to get us back to a place where we are bound no more by these things. I am like you, that I would rather not ingest these things into the brain, but the devil will see to it that we have the choice to do so in front of us, then it does become a choice, and it appears in these latter days that it is a choice in which many these days are failing to make the right one on. I am glad you are appalled at violence and the things of this nature, where as you are exercising a free choice as is made by you, but when the walls come closer and closer in, and your choices are becoming harder and harder to make because you can't seem to separate yourself or your children from this stuff freely, then Houston we have a serious problem. Hey the devil doesn't want to be left out either, so always remember that when trying to separate yourself from him and his bad ways. It is his goal to limit and restrict choices, especially choices that separate you and your children from him and his corrupting influence, so he is always on the other side of the coin we have, and it is up to us what choice we make when using that coin when spending it. Go forth and spend wisely my friend, as to spend foolishly is to empower the wrong side of the coin.

I'm afraid you lost me as soon as the "God" and "Devil" dichotomy showed up, so I'm not even sure what you're saying here. Is there an English version? Preferably one with a paragraph break?

 

[Pogo]

Remember this has happened on Obama's watch, so of course the libs will try everything they can now to change the meaning of terrorist acts or terrorism, because they have to save face for voting Obama into office as a leftist lib in which they figured that he was (hec, he may be something other than that actually, who knows), because he seems to be just riding the waves being created as they toss and turn him around and about, but dominant liberalism is the very definition of extreme weakness (IMHO), and this be it within and through out this nation, where as when we have a better balancing of power in charge, then liberalism is cloaked within that power yet does not dominate it, but when they control anything to much, then we are all in trouble in this nation, and it is showing big time.

Oh please.

Liberalism founded this country. It's what we're based on. If you don't like it, you're free to go live under a dictatorship.

The idea that "Obama planned Boston", if that's where you're going with this, is as absurd as the one that "Bush planned 9/11".

 

[Pogo]

The logic in your argument escapes me. It's not terrorism because the target wasn't political? The "target" was a large crowd of Bostonians. The Boston Marathon isn't just about running a race...it's more of a yearly celebration of the end of winter in New England. If you lived in the area you'd understand that. The choice of that venue was made because they knew that it would be a large crowd and that detonating bombs there would kill or maim hundreds of people. It was done to make a statement and that statement is that we are not safe walking the streets in our cities. You can't GET much more political than that! It's the very same technique terrorists have employed against Israel for decades. They bomb restaurants, movie theaters, busses and malls. They do so to attempt to intimidate ordinary citizens. That's what the Boston bombings were all about...they were an attempt to intimidate.

Actually I have lived in that area, and I do understand they chose a spot that would have a crowd as well as publicity. I just don't see them expressing a reason for doing it. The fact that we had to guess (and are still guessing) what it was supposed to mean --if indeed it means anything-- and even who they were, confirms that lack of message. When the World Trade Center was hit, or when George Tiller was shot in his church, we knew immediately what the act meant. And in the case of what looks like a random act, a real terrorist network will jump up and take responsibility for it, giving us a reasoning.

These guys did neither of those; the Boston marathon has a public gathering but it's not related in any way to politics, wars, Chechnya, religion or anything else. And not only did they not take responsibility, they did the opposite: they ran and had to be tracked down.

An attempt to intimidate? OK, but for intimidate who, from doing what? What's missing here is a message.

Trying to be smart by suggesting that it has to be related somehow to the marathon itself, when in fact it doesn't have to have anything to do with the marathon, only that the intent was to cause as much pain and suffering as possible in the choosing of the target in which they chose. Now what links them to the religion and the terrorism part of it, are their tactics, tools and many other things that the FBI has investigated, and for which will be concluded in the final, so yes Liberals are trying to defend the indefensible on this thread, and that is just soooo sad in the faces of the victims pain and loses in which they incurred since, and/or as a result of.

The two bolded phrases contradict each other. Pick a side. Either the site is significant, or it is not.

This is the only way "terrorism" can work: if the site is not symbolic of something (a church, a government building, an abortion clinic), that is if the target is a bunch of random bystanders, then the only element left to qualify as terrorism is a perpetrator announcing responsibility for the act. That agenda conveys the coercion message: "do what we say/comply with what we stand for, or the violence will continue". The onus is intended to fall on the victims to do something, or stop doing something, in response to the violence.

Here we have neither of those necessary elements; neither a symbolic setting, nor any defined entity taking responsibility. In fact, they ran and hid. How the fuck are we to get any message out of that? Plugging in our own CTs after the fact does NOT count. The terrorist must have a message to his victims, or it's not terrorism. It's random baseless violence.

And no, probing into their historical backgrounds to come up with theories doesn't count either. We didn't look at Tim McVeigh's background and conclude "Christian terrorism". You can't move the goalposts just to bring out the conclusion you'd like to see. That's utter bullshit. In terrorism there is no room to ponder what the message might be. If there is, you're engaged in looking for something that is not there.

 

[georgephillip]

Remember this has happened on Obama's watch, so of course the libs will try everything they can now to change the meaning of terrorist acts or terrorism, because they have to save face for voting Obama into office as a leftist lib in which they figured that he was (hec, he may be something other than that actually, who knows), because he seems to be just riding the waves being created as they toss and turn him around and about, but dominant liberalism is the very definition of extreme weakness (IMHO), and this be it within and through out this nation, where as when we have a better balancing of power in charge, then liberalism is cloaked within that power yet does not dominate it, but when they control anything to much, then we are all in trouble in this nation, and it is showing big time.

Oh please.

Liberalism founded this country. It's what we're based on. If you don't like it, you're free to go live under a dictatorship.

The idea that "Obama planned Boston", if that's where you're going with this, is as absurd as the one that "Bush planned 9/11".

Obama may profit from Boston in the same way Bush/Cheney did in Iraq.
The US has been funding and training fundamentalist Islam for decades.
Over the past two decades we have maimed, murdered, displaced, and incarcerated millions of innocent Muslims.
That level of state-sponsored terror is bound to blow back from time to time and Bush and Obama are well equipped to exploit Muslim revenge.

BTW, if you're wondering where Obama gets his inspiration for his drone policies here's one possibility:

"At last we know. The mysterious legal authority for Barack Obama’s killer drone program flows from another administration with an elastic interpretation of executive power: that of Richard Nixon.

"In a chilling 16-page dossier known simply as the White Paper, one of Obama’s statutory brains at the Justice Department cites the 1969 secret bombing of Cambodia as a legal rationale justifying drone strikes, deep inside nations, against which the United States is not officially at war.

"This startling disclosure is drafted in the antiseptic prose of an insurance adjuster announcing the denial of a claim based on a pre-existing condition.

"Yet, the bombing of Cambodia (aka Operation Menu), which involved more than 3,000 air strikes, was almost universally acknowledged as a war crime. Now the Obama administration has officially enshrined that atrocity as precedent for its own killing rampages."

The Game of Drones » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

 

[beagle9]

Remember this has happened on Obama's watch, so of course the libs will try everything they can now to change the meaning of terrorist acts or terrorism, because they have to save face for voting Obama into office as a leftist lib in which they figured that he was (hec, he may be something other than that actually, who knows), because he seems to be just riding the waves being created as they toss and turn him around and about, but dominant liberalism is the very definition of extreme weakness (IMHO), and this be it within and through out this nation, where as when we have a better balancing of power in charge, then liberalism is cloaked within that power yet does not dominate it, but when they control anything to much, then we are all in trouble in this nation, and it is showing big time.

Oh please.

Liberalism founded this country. It's what we're based on. If you don't like it, you're free to go live under a dictatorship.

The idea that "Obama planned Boston", if that's where you're going with this, is as absurd as the one that "Bush planned 9/11".

You actually read what I wrote, and then figured it interpreted to say that Obama is responsible for and/or helped plan the Boston Bombings ? If you think like this, then you are either crazy or a snake in the grass who tries to put words into peoples mouths in hopes that if it sticks, then you can get others to not read anything that you don't want them to read.

 

[Circe]

Okay, we have here a sort of incoherent violence directed against a crowd for no obvious reason. There seems to be some sort of jihadi inspiration, but not much political content, if any.

I have come to the conclusion that all this bombing and shooting is perfectly normal. And the police know this. Their response is directed to the normality of it: they continually increase security: more TSA insults, more CCTV cameras, more dogs, more guards, more metal detectors, more bullet-proof glass in primary schools.

The reason is that thousands and millions would do this if they could get away with it. So the only response is to show "normal" people that they can't get away with it. Then you mostly have outsiders doing it, like Chechen immigrants and people with schizophrenia and men who are suicidal anyway.

It's a mistake, I''m realizing, to suppose violence is abnormal!! Of course it's normal: look at Google News today, any day. Look at your local news, a continual bloodbath every week. Violence is a constant in the human condition, and now that it's so very easy to kill lots of people since a century or so ago, with dynamite and gunpowder and plastique and easily obtainable, cheap guns, of course people do exactly that. People love killing other people, at least many men do; it's how they are evolved to be.