Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Hard to get through all the analysis but so far it looks like the obvious military response would be exactly the wrong one. ISIS want a showdown.
Instead of victory or death – it seems like many of them want to die in a holy war.
Yes. Although it does seem that not everyone who joins them realises they're buying into that.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to George Darroch,
Home follows me around.
It will always be my parents’ place in Mangere, bought in the 80s when it was ramshackle and barely a house at all, before expanding like an accordion and becoming the place where 4, 5, 6, and 7 people lived (and sometimes more). It stays, the family changes shape.
That's one thing I don't have: the house where I grew up. I could always go and visit the houses, but that's not quite the same thing. I do feel good about the stability we've provided for our autistic boys, who would have struggled with change.
But it's going to be hard to avoid the temptation to cash up and move somewhere cheaper when Fiona and I reach 60. Through nothing but dumb luck and timing, there is a lot of money locked up in this place.
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The Guardian editorial:
And yet even if Isis did mean this night of slaughter to be a declaration of war, that does not mean France – or the rest of the world – needs to return the compliment. And a compliment it would be. To declare war against Isis is to flatter it, to grant it the dignity it craves. It accords it the status of a state, which Isis claims for itself but does not deserve. It confronts that murderous organisation on terms of its choosing rather than ours.
What’s more, rhetoric of that hue has a recent and unhappy history. In 2001, George W Bush similarly hailed 9/11 as a declaration of war. But the rubric of war, with its implied permission for the most extreme measures, saw the US and its allies make several disastrous decisions. Their impact is felt even now, nearly 15 years later. That category surely includes the forced collapse of Iraq and the subsequent incubation of Isis itself.
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
ETA: I have checked with the francophones I know, and they also say it is “They did not know that war had been declared on them”. An example of the risks, but also the poetry, of Google translate, because the incorrect translation seems to me at least as meaningful as the actual translation.
Thanks Lucy! I had added that image to the original post, so I've amended the translation there accordingly.
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This series posted to Instagram by Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Joann Sfar is worth any number of #PrayforParis hashtags.
This one reads: “The people who died tonight were out living, drinking, singing. They didn’t know they had declared war.”
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
That found passport bothers me – for a group obviously engaged in the ‘theatre of fear’ the stage properties are always as important – and that passport/person plays a (very useful) linchpin part in the direction of the unfolding response and narrative
I think it's appropriate to be wary about that. Some reports suggest that the passport may in fact have belong to an audience member – the other named attackers are older and French-born. Also, it is apparently very easy to obtain false Syrian passports.
Stories yesterday reported that two attackers may have posed as refugees arriving via Greece, but the Greeks have flatly denied a second man passed through. So we've got the name of one teenager who is listed as having entered via Greece as a refugee, but who may not be an attacker and is of quite a different background to the known attackers.
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Although all members of The Eagles of Death Metal escaped the Bataclan alive, their British merchandise manager and a Universal Music Group employee who worked with the band in France were killed. Bloody awful.
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The victims in Paris were French, Algerian, Spanish, Brazilian, Tunisian, Swedish, Romanian, Moroccan, Mexican, Portugese ...
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to chris,
So Assad’s incumbent administration designed a civil war to potentially oust itself and decimate its country while allowing verifiable information that it was the architect of these events to be widely disseminated via western media.
Are you hinting at a conspiracy? No.
In 2011, the Assad regime cracked down brutally on a pro-democracy movement that gained momentum after the arrest and torture of some teenagers who had written some revolutionary grafitti. Government soldiers fired on people who assembled in huge protests that, at the time, were solely demanding democratic reforms.
Eventually, opposition supporters armed themselves and subsequently formed rebel brigades. A civil war took shape, especially after Syrian Army officers defected to form the Free Syrian Army. At this point, Assad probably still had the support of a majority of the population, if only for the sake of peace. But he ordered shelling of residential neighbourhoods and, very probably, the use of chemical weapons.
The Kurds got involved after scores of Kurdish civilians in Aleppo were killed in 2012 when Assad's forces shelled their neighbourhood – the first of a number of massacres of Kurdish civilians by the Syrian government. Then Hezbollah weighed in on Assad's side.
First al Nusrah and then ISIS took advantage of the chaos to enter the fray in 2013, initially as allies of the FSA. But the moderates and ISIS were soon at war themselves. ISIS seized swathes of territory in Syria and then Iraq and also fought the Kurds and al Nusrah.
Basically, every time a new group joined the fray, things got worse. But it seems pretty clear that Assad began and escalated the violence. The Syria over which he once ruled basically doesn't exist any more.
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Tony Meyer,
From what I understand, your last image there should be credited to Jean Jullien.
Fair point. I grabbed it from Twitter and thought the credit would come through with it.
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