I fear that this is going to be nasty :(

[RegisterMe]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-47578798

Nasty? How trite .

[pjknibbs]

In two minds about this, because publicity is what these sick bastards want and we're giving them more of it by posting here. They've updated the article to say there are 40 dead and at least 20 injured now...shocking. Thoughts go out to the relatives of the dead.

[Morkonan]

In two minds about this, because publicity is what these sick bastards want and we're giving them more of it by posting here. They've updated the article to say there are 40 dead and at least 20 injured now...shocking. Thoughts go out to the relatives of the dead.

These guys are past the point of streaking out naked on a soccerfield waving a banner during a televised match. They were creating propaganda for a certain type of twisted audience that will be enthusiastically receiving news of this event regardless of whether or not we discuss its implications. "In my opinion."

People need to understand that this is "real." We can't shove it under the rug just because we don't like looking at it. All that does is make the resistance against these sorts of people less. People need to understand that this does, in fact, happen in their own back yard.

Further, we have some serious discussions as human beings in the Modern Age that we really need to have... We have to talk about the benefits of the "Freedom of Speech" and its impact on young people (and, idiots who are reveling in the affirmation of their twisted views) in an age where communication is ever-presents, instantaneous, and easily facilitated. And, perhaps, some discussion is needed about the gradual degeneration of the importance of the family unit due to the displacement of "real life interactions with human beings" by "online interactions with entities unknown."

There are people being grown that can not hold a comfortable conversation with another living human being that's standing in front of them because they have no friggin' practice doing it, let alone interacting with them in any meaningful way...

And, there are people who are successful at finding a cohort of a handful of people as twisted as they are in a population of billions of people they can reach out to with a few keystrokes, receiving instantaneous and over-inflated validation of their own warped ideals and further encouragement to dive further down their twisted rabbit-holes...

^-- These two things exist, right now, and are as real as rain. They're happening next door. Down the street. In the workplace. At the polls. In a world that is ever-growing, people are actually getting more feedback from echo chambers due to pursuing habits that actively reinforce "isolation" and third-party interaction. We are driving ourselves psychotic. On purpose.

Some of it is great. Here, we're able to talk about it and get some good feedback. But, if any one of us wanted to find the most twisted group to have conversations with, they're just a click away and their forum or Facebook page or Twitter feed would be just as big as the XForum's post database.

[felter]

The craziest part is that he was live streaming the shooting to Facebook. The NZ police quickly informed Facebook who immediately removed and closed the account down, but not before other sickos had downloaded copies of the live stream and the so called social media's are now fighting a battle to remove the video, no sooner do they remove it and it is just being re-uploaded.

[fiksal]

damn

[Usenko]

There is a way that we can report this, and report it accurately, without giving the dude what he wants. It's this:

Some stupid ****bag killed 50 people that had done nothing to harm him, and wounded a whole lot more, because of some frothing-at-the-mouth political bull**** that he obviously lacked the intellectual equipment to fully understand.

The cops have him now, and he'll be in the slammer presumably until he can put some coherent words together. Which is going to be a ruddy long time, obviously . . . .

(Note: I just can't bring myself to swear, even on the internet. ).

[Masterbagger]

He wrote a lengthy manifesto. It's about as twisted as you would expect. Claims to be radicalized by islamic terror attacks and goes into a whole lot of racial nonsense. I view it with skepticism. The guy probably expected to die and have that as his suicide note. I kind of wonder if the junk in that manifesto is him being honest or just trying to say whatever he thinks will get attention. In either case there is something broken about a person who could do what he did.

[eladan]

I view it with skepticism. The guy probably expected to die and have that as his suicide note. I kind of wonder if the junk in that manifesto is him being honest or just trying to say whatever he thinks will get attention.

I'm confident it's honest. The references he wrote on his guns, his activity on 8chan, suggest he was very much of that mind. Plus, if he really expected to die, I think he would have found a way to die. Not that it would have been difficult, with law enforcement likely on a hair trigger when confronting him.

In either case there is something broken about a person who could do what he did.

There, I entirely agree with you.

[Antilogic]

I believe this is the first one to directly reference both extreme-right online culture and internet culture in general.

Traditional media isn't going to understand how to process this in a non damaging way, e.g. the daily mails crap headlines today trying to blame Facebook for taking 17 minutes to react to the video. Manual 17 minute takedown is bloody exceptional. Nevermind that they are STILL PUTTING THE KILLERS PHOTO ON THE SODDING FRONT PAGES AND ONLINE. How to generate copycat events 101, create massive amounts of personal attention for the killer.

Never mind the comments in his meme-filled manifesto. I mean he breaks out into the Navy Seal copypasta ffs. Media sites that struggle to convey normal internet culture without restoring to "Who is this 4chan" are going to fail completely at any kind of real processing of this, which is likely what he wants. There's not going to be any drive to understand and treat the kind of environment that breeds people like this, if any action is taken it will simply be heavy handed attempts at public reassurance which will have no real effect apart from simply serve to further radicalise more people and result in more deaths down the line.

[Morkonan]

I believe this is the first one to directly reference both extreme-right online culture and internet culture in general.

It's pretty close to that. We don't have a lot of written manifestos from previous wackos, though. And, of what there is, I don't think many are as verbose.

Traditional media isn't going to understand how to process this in a non damaging way, e.g. the daily mails crap headlines today trying to blame Facebook for taking 17 minutes to react to the video. Manual 17 minute takedown is bloody exceptional. Nevermind that they are STILL PUTTING THE KILLERS PHOTO ON THE SODDING FRONT PAGES AND ONLINE. How to generate copycat events 101, create massive amounts of personal attention for the killer.

Teh Interwebz doesn't read the news... What I mean is that all that the groups who favor this will see is "validation" that "one of us did something." Sure, they'll be "inspired," but they won't read the fine-print after awhile. They'll head off on their own tangent. I would say, though, that publishing his manifesto isn't a good move. BUT, the rest of us, the somewhat sane, have to figure out how to parse all of this. We need that kind of insight to figure out wtf this guy thought he was doing. Win/lose situation? Probably.

Never mind the comments in his meme-filled manifesto. I mean he breaks out into the Navy Seal copypasta ffs. Media sites that struggle to convey normal internet culture without restoring to "Who is this 4chan" are going to fail completely at any kind of real processing of this, which is likely what he wants. There's not going to be any drive to understand and treat the kind of environment that breeds people like this, if any action is taken it will simply be heavy handed attempts at public reassurance which will have no real effect apart from simply serve to further radicalise more people and result in more deaths down the line.

The people out there that would support this kind of act are the same people that would spend hours, maybe even attempt illegal activities, in order to find pictures of the disfigured faces of the corpses mutilated by gunfire, copy the worst possible imagery from those pictures, make a "meme" out of them and then post them in a place where nobody outside of their group knows about or can get access to, all to gain notariety in their little circle as they bask in the comments of "That's so awesome" and "lolz that how all $^$@^ should be ded."

This... kind of stuff shows up all too frequently. It's the kind of thing that the media doesn't want to talk about and people "refuse to believe that anyone would do that." Meanwhile, Little Johnny is in his room, supposedly doing his homework, but he's really posting cool dank memes of crime-scene photos and touching himself, vigorously... If they somehow came across his activities, Little Johnny's parents _could_not_parse_ what Little Johnny is exposed to online these days. Want to know what happens when kids and wackos are thrown into "an interntez" together with absolutely no rules, no stewardship, no attempt at restraint? Well, there ya go... Little Johnny is now fixated on grisly crime scene photos and dead bodies as a trigger for extremely strong reactions/emotions that his adolescent brain can't handle and some wacko is telling him that "it's normal and OK" just to validate their own sick fixation... Heck, this is tame compared to some of the whacked out crap people come up with when they think nobody can see them but people who think like they do. :/

The "World" doesn't want to have to try to understand how all of this works. Nobody does, really. But, that doesn't mean that the days of quietly watching a movie with your spouse while the kids go amuse themselves with their "computer" and "phones" are friggin the frig over. It's bad enough when Little Johnny hangs out with the wrong type of friends. Now, Little Johnny can hang out with an entire mental-institution's worth of wackjobs and nuts for hours every day and his parents don't have a clue. And, that's just children. "Adults" indulging in such garbage are as free to addict themselves to their twisted ideologies for as long as they want, even to the point of coming up with some disgusting idea and then goading each other into actually acting on it.

In the US, there was a case where a police officer became heavily involved in one of those wackjob communities where people conducted "fake" abductions and then wrote out their fantasies. Things escalated, of course, since he had to pursue even heavier fantasies in order to keep himself stimulated. So, next it was actively, in real life, pretending that he was stalking a woman. He built up an entire fantasy using real-life activities to boost it and make himself even more excited about kidnapping someone. He and one of his online buddies, from the group, got heavily involved in planning it all using real-life information about a particular woman he wanted to kidnap, torture, rape, dismember, eat, whatever the heck they could think up to even further stimulate themselves. He used his own credentials in law-enforcement to gain even more access to information about his "target."

He was caught, eventually, before he could "take the next step" to increase the indulgence of his favorite fetish by actually carrying it out "in real life" even though he had already long been doing the equivalent of criminally stalking someone.

But, he was caught before he could carry out the actual act and these wackos were not.

That's the only difference, really. In the theater of the mind, the people responsible for this mass-murder are no different than that one man pursuing a fetish. They're stimulated in much the same way. They experience many of the same hormones. They receive validation for their twisted fantasies in the same way. They have the same type of behavior in seeking ever more increasing stimuli to pump their brain juices. And, teh interwebz is so very good for enabling people to do that very thing.

But, we don't want to see that, do we? Do we really want to "know?" And, once we do know, do we want to take responsibility for it?

It's not about censorship or radical enforcement. It's about the willingness of the public to think that "it can't happen" and "nobody could really think about that sort of thing." If Ogrish taught us anything it's that this stuff builds up until it winds up in front of our faces, eventually. Sure, that was pictures, but this latest atrocity is an example of just how severe these things can get if left unfettered.

I'm willing to bet that this guy or people in his group were on someone's "list," somewhere. Somebody at least knew these people were part of some wackjob online site, somewhere. The easy thing is to then "blame law enforcement." But, that's wrong. It's not law-enforcement's fault that it can't change people or enforce social and cultural values that would make committing such an act unthinkable. That's OUR job.

[Alan Phipps]

Mork postulated: "Somebody at least knew these people were part of some wackjob online site, somewhere."

Obviously not amongst the people issuing a multiple firearms licence.

News article quote:
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern said the suspect held a Category A gun licence which enabled him to legally obtain semi-automatic weapons, and said the country’s gun laws would change in the wake of the attack. Ms Ardern said the firearms used in the mosque shootings appeared to have been modified. She said: “New Zealanders will question how someone can come into being in possession of weapons of this nature."

If somebody rational knew about a 'wackjob' group with illegally modified guns then hopefully common sense would dictate that something should have been said to the relevant authorities.

[Usenko]

If somebody rational knew about a 'wackjob' group with illegally modified guns then hopefully common sense would dictate that something should have been said to the relevant authorities.

This is an interesting thing, and I suspect an Australian understands this better than people from many places.

Sure, the idea that whackjobs with guns is a serious problem. Only . . on Thursday evening, it didn't look like anywhere near as big a deal it was by Friday evening. In theory the whackjobs COULD cause a problem on NZ soil, but until then they HADN'T. Terrorism was a comfortably far-away problem. This stuff didn't happen in New Zealand, it happened overseas.

I understand this because until the Bali Bombings, Australians didn't take the threat of terrorism seriously. Once it directly affected large numbers of Aussies, of course things were different.

It's not that we think that other countries' problems couldn't come here; it's that we don't think they WILL. We've lived all our lives in a world where that was a foreign problem.

[pjknibbs]

There's been one in Utrecht now. Only one confirmed dead there, but one wonders if this was a copycat:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47611811

[theeclownbroze]

There's been one in Utrecht now. Only one confirmed dead there, but one wonders if this was a copycat:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47611811

Based on the picture of one of the victims I doubt it's a copycat, most likely a muslim revenge attack.

[Grim Lock]

As it stands now in Utrecht, three deaths, five injured, the prime suspect is a man of Turkish descent, 37 years old who has a history of unstable behavior.

There are some indications that altough this man was a Muslim he apparently had some periods where he was more serious about it and times he'd pretty much abandoned it. There are also some indications that it might be a family or relational situation and he was targeting someone specific, however at this point this all hasn't yet been confirmed by the police who are still keeping all options open.

Edit: The prime suspect has been arrested, a second person has also been arrested, it's not clear who or why.

[Morkonan]

...If somebody rational knew about a 'wackjob' group with illegally modified guns then hopefully common sense would dictate that something should have been said to the relevant authorities.

Yes/No/Maybe

It all depends on how well their security services and intel groups communicate. Or, whoever it is that gathers or can potentially gather such information.

For instance, I watched a bit of a documentary/something concerning the Malaysian flight that was "lost." Remember that? We found that it unexpectedly deviated from its flightplan for reasons unknown. However, the kicker is that the Malaysian military was watching it do that the entire time. And, when civilian air authorities were scratching their head and wondering what had happened, the military kept their mouths shut... They didn't say a word. They knew it was off-course and did nothing at all but "watch." They could have scrambled fighters, radio'd, screamed, something. But, they didn't do a thing. (At least, from the short bit I watched in passing.)

In some other countries, that couldn't happen. In the US, today especially, that couldn't happen.

But, in other things, it certainly does happen. There have been several cases where there were "bad people doing bad things" in the US and Intel and Federal Agencies were aware of the habits of such people, just not that they were about to immediately do "bad things." Yet, no attempt was made by intel agencies to contact local authorities about such people.

Countries want to keep their surveillance and intelligence agency's capabililies a "mystery." It's habit, even if they're not under threat of an imminent invasion. So, if New Zealand's various agencies are compartmentalized to a certain degree, one agency may very well have been actively investigating this nutjob without informing any licensing agencies or law-enforcement. It happens in the US and we literally throw truckloads of money and employees at de-compartmentalizing these agencies in terms of internal enforcement. We have an entire arm created expressly for the purpose of sharing intelligence and coordinating efforts. (Department of Homeland Security, created after 9/11.) And... this still happens. /shrug

There's no blame in that. It's not the fault of anyone else that this wacko indulged his crazy notions by killing a lot of people - It's entirely his fault. The question is, though, are there things that we need to be sure are being communicated across law-enforcement and intel agencies that could have helped to prevent this without violating what our cultures consider to be privileged personal information, privacy, and the legal rights of citizens? (I'm certainly not suggesting a knee-jerk reaction of increased surveillance of citizens in terms of "trying to find crime no matter who they're looking at." That's bad.)

[Alan Phipps]

@ Mork: Oh, I see you were considering a possible government inter-departmental conspiracy of silence theory.

Sorry, I was thinking more about acquaintances, neighbours or even local tradesmen maybe hearing about or spotting something glaringly suspicious and dangerous and, you know, actually talking to the police about it. That sort of thing is more likely to happen in some countries than perhaps in others. I would put New Zealand in the former category personally.

[Morkonan]

@ Mork: Oh, I see you were considering a possible government inter-departmental conspiracy of silence theory.

I wouldn't call it a "conspiracy theory" since it's based on common compartmentalization and security principles. There are many cases where lower-level, local, law-enforcement could have benefited from closer relationships with larger, sometimes National Intelligence based, agencies. That disfunction is not a secret or a conspiracy. And, there's some cases where larger agencies completely drop the ball and fail "everything." Like, for instance, the FBI was actively investigating the person who ended up shooting/killing those people in that Florida nightclub. Including, IIRC (and just from memory) something like a dozen reports and alerts on the guy with people calling in tips and scheduled investigative visits/interviews/whatever that were either not conducted or were, with halphazard no-result kind of findings. And, yet, local law enforcement didn't know of the FBI's interest, AFAIK on that last bit. But, that pales in comparison to what larger Foreign Intelligence agencies "know and do." Their efforts, at least in the US, were so compartmentalized we invented the Department of Homeland Security to bring these agencies together. And, to further coordinate efforts, we have the Five Eyes, in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. for "international efforts." (So they can spy on each other's citizens and get return information on their own so they're not violating their own laws by spying directly... )

Sorry, I was thinking more about acquaintances, neighbours or even local tradesmen maybe hearing about or spotting something glaringly suspicious and dangerous and, you know, actually talking to the police about it. That sort of thing is more likely to happen in some countries than perhaps in others. I would put New Zealand in the former category personally.

That does happen, but it is all tempered by whatever the laws are. For instance, in the above example, the shooter in Florida was reported to the FBI as potentially being dangerous. But, not much happened there. Others have been reported in one way or another as well, either to social-service type agencies, local law-enforcement, etc.. Some have even been "known risk candidates" and ended up committing their crimes anyway.

The point is that even if we "know someone is a risky candidate" there are limits to "who" can know that and even what can be done about it. At least in regards to local law.

If you call up the FBI and scream into the phone "Morkonan is a valid risk to the safety and security of your cheesecake" you may, in fact, be entirely correct. I am a well-known cheesecake enthusiast and may even have a "This guy has an unhealthy obsession with Cheesecake" entry on somebody's list, somewhere. But what can they do with that information and how far should they go in confirming it?

I haven't had a slice of cheesecake in years... I love it, I just haven't had the occasion to have any.

So, despite the fact that I would obviously be obsessed with the stuff, how far can an agency go in investigating me for a crime I have "not yet committed?" How far can they go without starting to step all over my Rights? And, there's always the obvious - The more someone looks and pries, the more likely they'll "find something," even if it's entirely fictional and circumstantial. They might see a crumb of some nasty piece of pie I was forced to eat and then charge me with unlawfully consuming Cheesecake! (IF you know any good cheesecake recipes, let me know! I seriously want to make some to take over to my neighbors, since they often bring me stuffs like that... except for cheesecake, which they haven't brought over yet. )

So, if you report me for real or imagined cheescake shennanigans, what should the Cheesecake Enforcement Arm of the FBI do with that? Liking cheesecake isn't against the law.

Evidently, having radical racist ideals isn't against the law in New Zealand, right? IOW - There isn't any "thought law" in New Zealand, is there?

Edit:Add - Just to add, this is why Science Fiction can be relevant.



We don't have this technology yet, but there are times when we "think we do." Do we act on "we think so" rather than "we know so?" Where is the line between justice and irrational fear?

[Alan Phipps]

"If somebody rational knew about a 'wackjob' group with illegally modified guns .."

Maybe we and our police would consider information about that sort of thing a bit more ominous and actionable than might be the case in the USA perhaps. I rather think that should apply 'down under' as well, but maybe there was a possible element of 'It won't happen here' as Usenko theorised.

[Morkonan]

... 'It won't happen here' as Usenko theorised.

That's possible. But, I'm reminded of European countries that thought the same thing, too. The Oceana region may think itself somewhat isolated from some of the events of the rest of the world, but "ideas" aren't one of those things. The internet is, good pizza is, spider-free zones are... But, not ideas. And, ideas are the first step of action.

Well, I guess one doesn't have to have an idea to go running around naked and screaming in a bowling alley. Kind of unlikely to happen if one actually thinks about it beforehand. At least that's what I told the judge and he was cool with that...