Danish Terror Attack

[Gfted1]

Denmark unveils new anti-terror plan.

[Gorgon]

It is a bit weird seeing cops with submachineguns everywhere. I suspect it's more a PR thing, showing the flag and whatnot, than a practical consideration. 

[Malcador]

Good time to invest the security sector.

[Namutree]

 

 

What worries me is the support he still seems to have received from some sectors of community? How do you explain that ?

 

 

 

 

There's a general lack of compassion and appreciation of the value of human life all over the place. It certainly doesn't help when those who some consider our leaders have the same kind of callous attitude:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_x04Gn3-2g

 

 

Wow wtf this is awful. When did Hilary turn into such a scumbag?

 

She was always a scumbag.

[Volourn]

Namutree beat me to it...

[Janmanden]

Denmark unveils new anti-terror plan.

 

That's crazy. Some nutcase goes berzerk and instead of improving the handling of nutcases they turn it into an act of *cough*racism*cough* terrorism. There is so much fantasy in this, including the other links in that article, that it's beginnning to sound like a script for a movie.

[BruceVC]

 

Denmark unveils new anti-terror plan.

 

That's crazy. Some nutcase goes berzerk and instead of improving the handling of nutcases they turn it into an act of *cough*racism*cough* terrorism. There is so much fantasy in this, including the other links in that article, that it's beginnning to sound like a script for a movie.

 

 

Not sure why you think the plan is extreme or unreasonable ?

 

They will be investing in things like intelligence gathering and  making sure the police and security forces are better equipped and trained. Seems normal to me?

[Gorgon]

If we invested 150 mil $ in say, accident prevention and infrastructure we would save more lives guaranteed.

 

High profile incidents like this sometimes lead to impulsive decisions. The less emotion surrounding legislation like this the better off we are going to be. This was just one nutjob. You don't legislate on the basis of one nutjob. I mean we are not talking Anders Breivik here. Two people got shot. 

[Janmanden]

A native nutcase with some serious social problems that has been ignored so far and who was released from prison two weeks before, goes on a killing spree and the response is to waste $150,000,000.00 on anti-terrorism with more intelligence gathering, more training and equipment? That sounds reasonable to you?

 

Problem is it was not an act of terrorism, but it has certainly become an act of politicism and spin totally out of control. 

 

"Copenhagen police said the suspected gunman who was born and raised in Denmark was already "on the radar" of the intelligence services that they were investigating whether he had travelled to conflict zones such as Syria and Iraq." They already had him on the radar. Apparently there is absolutely nothing wrong with the current level of intelligence..

 

The most crazy response from the Israeli Prime (with a little extra spin from some journalists to ensure higher rating, I think):

'Jews are on the front lines of this war'

After the fatal attacks in Copenhagen, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for a 'mass immigration' of European Jews to Israel. DW spoke with two Jewish leaders about the threat to Europe's Jewish community.

 

Reading through it all from that source, which seems rather questionable to me. It really sounds like a movie, where you'd expect some conspiracy with a politician pulling strings to add the sympathy for extra funds and voting power..  I am sure that World War III is just hanging around the corner and his public name is Omar Has Bin Jensen or something.

[Meshugger]

Well, i wouldn't put the guy in the same league as Ted Kaczynsky and Breivik. They acted on their own esoteric beliefs that they conjured themselves. This guy acted in a way that was perfectly acceptable some parts of the world. But that is a different matter.

[Tigranes]

Bruce you are once again pushing your own agenda while pretending not to. It's irrelevant whether you do it deliberately or not - but basically here is X, and it's loosely but not strongly related to Y given the basic facts. You just sit there and keep asking "hey do you think X brings up a problem with Y? I"m only asking." Well I might take the same strategy and just keep talking about how I wonder whether this attack is another case of exposing a fundamental brokenness in Western society. I wouldn't claim that is the case, of course not, I would just ask everyone whether they think perhaps this attack is showing that Western society does not work? It's called agenda setting and it already shows your bias towards thinking a certain way. 

 

The reason that this attack doesn't really have much to do with judging the success of the Danish integration strategy is that (1) with this guy it wasn't a question of integrating in that sense; (2) nothing in that policy had specifically caused any of the key factors that allowed this guy to run free and shoot people; (3) if an integration strategy was judged by singular attacks then we might as well get rid of every security system in the world. 

 

The problem with what you are doing is that it creates an association, and encourages a culture driven by fear and anxiety where we say, well we know this guy was just a drug dealer out on a crazy shooting spree, just like the unstable and life-ruined half-con man in Sydney, but maybe it has something to do with integration strategy? Does that mean we need more guns? Maybe we need to be harsher on Muslim immigrants? etc, etc, etc. 

 

You see this kind of thinking in US schools. There, at least, they are justified in being worried; there have been literally over a hundred school shootings in recent memory, not just a single nutjob. But this has led to some crazy things like the state basically getting armed police to invade middle schools in a gun attack drill that neither students, parents nor the teachers were told about in advance, making 13 and 14 year olds experience what it is like to have gunmen literally attack their school. Because it might save lives. Because clearly previous systems "didn't work". 

 

The thing is, you need to be very careful about assessing whether a safety system "didn't work". Singular attacks don't do it. And even if there are frequent attacks, you have to do some analysis to find out what is responsible. Otherwise it's like saying, hey, I got hit by lightning, I will never stand under a tree the rest of my life. Or hey, look at all the car crashes still happening, the traffic lights system clearly needs to be scrapped. 

 

There needs to be a sense of proportion. The heinousness of this kind of attack and the lives on the line mean we have to be even more careful. For example, the new anti-terror plan linked in this thread - I haven't read about it in more detail, but it obviously doesn't have much to do with stopping this kind of killer, who properly speaking is a domestic deviant and not much to do with terrorism. 

 

To just sit there and idly say "hey, someone killed some people, maybe integration strategy isn't working?" or "hey, they're arming police better, that's always a good thing and makes us safer, right?" is (1) basically making zero use of the information available to you and working on the broadest levels, like saying "hey going faster is more dangerous right", and (2) constantly asking other people about such associations basically invites people to associate some things as if they really are related. We're just shooting crap on an internet forum, so OK, but if I saw a journalist or politician or analyst doing such a thing, they would be not only inaccurate but irresponsible. 

[Zoraptor]

I'm always reminded when knees jerk up through tables over terrorism that the only act of international terrorism here was by the French DGSE, ordered by the French Defence Minister. What, exactly, the reaction to that would be in the current climate is really rather an interesting question, since it wasn't committed by the 'right' people to push any particular agenda- for the French not much except for the embarrassment of getting caught by crack counter intelligence agency the 1980s New Zealand Police and for us... well, I can't see us deciding to spend $150 million on monitoring people saying 'zut alors' in comical accents while wearing stripey skivvies, onion coils and berets on the chance they might be radical French agents bent on mayhem. They might enjoy all the back episodes of 'Allo 'Allo they got to watch though.

 

More people die from just about anything other than terrorism, and there's already too much information. Both the Charlie Hebdo guys and this guy were already 'known', adding an extra order of magnitude to those 'known' is hardly going to improve matters, when the vast majority of suspects never do anything.

[Wrath of Dagon]

The point of terrorism is more the terror than the casualties, thus the name.

[BruceVC]

Bruce you are once again pushing your own agenda while pretending not to. It's irrelevant whether you do it deliberately or not - but basically here is X, and it's loosely but not strongly related to Y given the basic facts. You just sit there and keep asking "hey do you think X brings up a problem with Y? I"m only asking." Well I might take the same strategy and just keep talking about how I wonder whether this attack is another case of exposing a fundamental brokenness in Western society. I wouldn't claim that is the case, of course not, I would just ask everyone whether they think perhaps this attack is showing that Western society does not work? It's called agenda setting and it already shows your bias towards thinking a certain way. 

 

The reason that this attack doesn't really have much to do with judging the success of the Danish integration strategy is that (1) with this guy it wasn't a question of integrating in that sense; (2) nothing in that policy had specifically caused any of the key factors that allowed this guy to run free and shoot people; (3) if an integration strategy was judged by singular attacks then we might as well get rid of every security system in the world. 

 

The problem with what you are doing is that it creates an association, and encourages a culture driven by fear and anxiety where we say, well we know this guy was just a drug dealer out on a crazy shooting spree, just like the unstable and life-ruined half-con man in Sydney, but maybe it has something to do with integration strategy? Does that mean we need more guns? Maybe we need to be harsher on Muslim immigrants? etc, etc, etc. 

 

You see this kind of thinking in US schools. There, at least, they are justified in being worried; there have been literally over a hundred school shootings in recent memory, not just a single nutjob. But this has led to some crazy things like the state basically getting armed police to invade middle schools in a gun attack drill that neither students, parents nor the teachers were told about in advance, making 13 and 14 year olds experience what it is like to have gunmen literally attack their school. Because it might save lives. Because clearly previous systems "didn't work". 

 

The thing is, you need to be very careful about assessing whether a safety system "didn't work". Singular attacks don't do it. And even if there are frequent attacks, you have to do some analysis to find out what is responsible. Otherwise it's like saying, hey, I got hit by lightning, I will never stand under a tree the rest of my life. Or hey, look at all the car crashes still happening, the traffic lights system clearly needs to be scrapped. 

 

There needs to be a sense of proportion. The heinousness of this kind of attack and the lives on the line mean we have to be even more careful. For example, the new anti-terror plan linked in this thread - I haven't read about it in more detail, but it obviously doesn't have much to do with stopping this kind of killer, who properly speaking is a domestic deviant and not much to do with terrorism. 

 

To just sit there and idly say "hey, someone killed some people, maybe integration strategy isn't working?" or "hey, they're arming police better, that's always a good thing and makes us safer, right?" is (1) basically making zero use of the information available to you and working on the broadest levels, like saying "hey going faster is more dangerous right", and (2) constantly asking other people about such associations basically invites people to associate some things as if they really are related. We're just shooting crap on an internet forum, so OK, but if I saw a journalist or politician or analyst doing such a thing, they would be not only inaccurate but irresponsible. 

 

You make some good points and I appreciate the time you took to explain why you feel my original questions are not relevant in the broader context of the Danish efforts to integrate people into there society

 

But you are also misunderstanding a few things. Firstly I am not fear mongering and raising concerns that aren't relevant or we should discuss. The Danes have implemented new "anti-terror "  laws preciously because they have identified gaps with how they integrate new citizens and how they protect themselves from homegrown terrorists. So this is not my view when I say " Should Denmark relook at how they address extremism  ", this is a direction that the Danish government is now following. So maybe we should take it a bit more seriously than " BruceVC contributing towards  hyperbole and a knee-jerk reaction " 

 

This is an issue that European countries are currently dealing with. And the two most commonly asked questions are " how do we integrate people successfully  into our culture " and " what do we do about citizens  influenced by extremism ". I don't think the Danes are helping to contribute towards a culture of fear and anxiety but rather they have realized their previous endeavors to protect their citizens are lacking

 

Also you say that the new anti-terror laws wouldn't have helped this type of attack, we cannot say that with certainty. For example this gunman could  have had a social media presence and might have discussed on various forums what he intended. With proper monitoring of internet chatter the Danes would  have been aware of this. Many terrorist attacks have been prevented by the fact that  extremists are quite open on the Internet and this alerts local security services to their intentions. So the Danes are now investing in more enhanced information gathering around the Internet , this should make perfect sense to anyone ? 

 

So in summary if this was just a lone criminal acting without any ideological influence then I am sure the Danes wouldn't be changing legislation, so I think this attack represents something more serious that we should at least try to understand ?

[HoonDing]

Blame Lego.