Explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon

[Lantyssa]

If they're Muslim then they must be brown.

[Crumbs]

Right wing "extremists" and tea partiers being blamed in this thread. What complete bullshit. If we stopped for 5 seconds and listened to each other instead of making mustache twirling villainous characterizations of those who have opposing views to our own maybe we'd get something fucking done in this country.

Now that we know they were Chechen, take a look around the net at what is being said about these "obviously Muslim" fellows.  I realize you weren't defending anyone, and trying to be objective, but there is a major victory dance being performed today by the racist islamophobes.  The green light for being openly hateful towards Muslims has been reset today.

[Shannow]

Well both these threads are heading quickly to the politics forum.

[UnSub]

The story goes a 4channer had Sunil pegged over 4 hours ago once the FBI released the images, reddit then picked it up, then it got plastered on the news shortly after the scanner feed verified the subject's name.  Unreal.  This is why you dont keep fuckin info. from the public unless you absolutely have to.

There's a big issue with throwing brute force at a problem. Sometimes it ends up fitting square pegs in round holes.

The other issue is the What You See Is All There Is issue i.e. only the information in front of you matters. Redditers acted as if all they needed to do was look at videos and photos and they'd find enough evidence to 'prove' the bomber(s), and maybe if someone was shooting the right footage at the right time then someone might have seen something. But that's a lot of ifs. 

Reddit also didn't have access to the continuous video feeds from security cameras, or mobile phone records, or interviews with the wounded, or a whole heap of other information that law enforcement did. They might have had more collective human hours to throw at the problem, but they are using much cruder instruments.

There's a case for online action to have scared a number of people of interest out there (who suddenly found they were people of interest because 4chan declared it so) into police stations to clear their name, but there's no evidence yet that law enforcement was even interested in any of these people. Such things may have been a waste of police resources.

This is going to end up a very interesting case study for a number of reasons. Top of that list will be how law enforcement can do any investigating when the Internet Justice Posse is potentially listening to the police scanner, entering a groupthink about suspects and loudly pointing the finger at the wrong people which then gets repeated by the media.

[UnSub]

Well both these threads are heading quickly to the politics forum.

Crisis over; business resumes as normal.

[Crumbs]

Well both these threads are heading quickly to the politics forum.

Crisis over; business resumes as normal.

That business being a call for blood.  Maybe we'll be buddies with Putin again, united by the common enemy of Chechnya.  I sure hope not, but our track record almost dictates it.

[DraconianOne]

On a tangenital, soon to be found in Politics note, an interesting article about the London Marathon in the wake of this weeks events in Boston.

[Sir T]

One way to curb it would be for shitstains like the New York Post to stop posting goddamn headlines like that pictured above. No, it wouldn't stop the Internet Detectives, but it might make some glory seekers among them a bit less inclined to waste manhours being Internet Detectives. Also, FUCK THE NY POST IN ITS EARHOLE.

http://gawker.com/5994999/is-the-new-york-post-edited-by-a-bigoted-drunk-who-fucks-pigs

Given all the surrounding discussion and the shaky performance of the Post and its law-enforcement sources, one might even conclude that to have slapped the photo on the front page, an editor would have had to have been cripplingly stupid, cripplingly reckless, or both. We do not know for sure that [NY Post] Col Allan is cripplingly stupid and reckless. We may have heard from sources that Col Allan is stupid and reckless. But we do not know it, so we are not saying it.

Sources have also suggested that Col Allan may drink to excess, but we have no direct knowledge that he is an alcoholic, or that he was drunk at any time that he was guiding the Post through its various blunders in the marathon coverage. Col Allan may have been too drunk to recognize the mistakes that the Post was making—say, to see that it was publishing a front-page photo of young man carrying a royal-blue duffel bag when the authorities were saying the bombs had been in black bags. That is a mistake that a drunk person could conceivably have made, but we do not know that Col Allan was drunk when the Post made it.

The Post had previously identified an innocent Saudi as a suspect before it decided to put this brown-skinned teenager on the front page. The back-to-back focus on innocent people of non-European ancestry could imply that the Post is systematically hostile to nonwhite people, and that the paper's editors are so wedded to the notion that all Muslims are terrorists that they literally do not care which Muslim or "Muslim-looking" person they happen to be targeting on any particular day. We are not saying that Col Allan, motivated by bigotry, is intentionally trying to use the Post to stir up hostility against Muslims. We do not know that Col Allan is a racist. The evidence may suggest that he is a racist, but we are not saying that Col Allan is a racist.

[...]

But we are not drawing any conclusions about that. Perhaps Col Allan and the New York Post are having an incredibly unlucky week. Perhaps the worthlessness of every single scoop the Post has had—its inability even to get the body count straight—does not prove that the editor is a booze-addled, race-baiting, information-illiterate moron who has neither the common sense nor the journalistic skills to avoid repeatedly humiliating his newspaper.

We would not say that, any more than we would say that Col Allan fucks pigs. He is from Australia; if he were to engage in bestiality, it's much more likely that it would be with sheep. But we are not saying Col Allan fucks sheep, either. It could be that Col Allan fucks pigs or sheep. We do not know. It would be irresponsible to speculate.

[Ironwood]

That escalated quickly.

[Paelos]

If they're Muslim then they must be brown.

If they're blowing shit up, I don't care what race or religion they are.

[Arthur_Parker]

https://twitter.com/J_tsar

[Ghambit]

So wow, it's now likley Sunil isnt the guy eh?  Disappointing.  The Scanner had all but verified him.  Oh well.  Moving on. 
It's been said Tsarnaev has a laptop with him and might be posting, but good luck sifting through the fakes.

[HaemishM]

Woke up to said Michael Bay movie and was like WTF?

Then heard the bombers were Chechen and was even more like WTF? X 7. However, the Chechen independence movement has never been very logical. They tend to blow shit up and expect the attention given the explosions will make people give a shit about their independence from Russia when in reality it just makes people not give a shit about their independence at all. They are brutal, vicious motherfuckers. They are like Koreans on Lineage.

I always thought it was a bit of weak sauce for an AQ operation (especially since they denied involvement) so I'm going to make a wild ass speculation and say these guys probably didn't have a lot of AQ/institutional backing on this. Since only 2 of the 5 bombs went off, it was sophisticated but not necessarily professional. It sounds a lot more like the idiot attempts that the FBI has been foiling since 9/11 - the Times Square van, the shoe bombers and such. Random, pissed off guys who are already here but don't have a lot of connection to the main leadership of AQ.

Also, these guys are about as brown as me, so the right wing brown hating machine can go fuck itself.

[Paelos]

US people fear/distrust Muslims. The implied connotation is that they are brown. The reality is often something else. Not all Muslims are brown, and not all browns are Muslims.

But anybody that blows up innocent bystander civilians deserves to be skullfucked in Hell by whatever set of deities you claimed backed this mess.

[HaemishM]

But anybody that blows up innocent bystander civilians deserves to be skullfucked in Hell by whatever set of deities you claimed backed this mess.

I prefer we get to skullfuck him on Earth for a few years first, but I'm totally behind this.

You want sympathy for your oppression by the Russians? Blowing up 8-year old boys is not the fucking way to do it.

[Engels]

Listening to an MIT political science professor this morning on the local AM station in Boston (WBZ 1030 AM), he did say that there are strong links between AQ and Chechen separatists. AQ specifically tries to recruit them because Chechens aren't 'brown' and get through security with greater ease.

I don't think this is about Chechnya. I think this is about AQ. Chechens, although ignored by the US, have no reason to antagonize the west, since it has tried, half-heartedly, to show the brutality of the Russian oppression of the Chechen nation. I remember listening to very sympathetic reports on Chechen rebels as far back as 1992.

Now that Chechnya is largely forgotten by the west, it seems that it has become fertile soil  for AQ.

[Ghambit]

SWAT/ERT
04/19/13 11:04   (WATERTOWN - ) UNITS HAVE A MAN DOWN ON THE GROUND THREATENING TO BLOW HIMSELF UP, NEGOTIATOR WORKING [MAS198]

[calapine]

I prefer we get to skullfuck him on Earth for a few years first, but I'm totally behind this.

You want sympathy for your oppression by the Russians? Blowing up 8-year old boys is not the fucking way to do it.

I doubt this is about getting attention/sympathy for a cause and more coming from alienation and revenge for some perceived injustice.

[Venkman]

The market for the NYP has been the Tea Party demographic since between before there was a Tea Party. It has always made the NY Daily News look like the NW Times.

Their fuckstupid retrograde appraoch only occasionally gets national attention. But that never affects how they do things, because their audience doesn't change. They in fact probably like that their brand of thinking gets the exposure "it deserves".

[Ghambit]

He's a smart kid who just got radicalized it seems.

Here's a working scanner link:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ma-rt-9-window-cam

[01101010]

I would be totally astounded if this guy doesn't take his own life.

[DraconianOne]

He's a smart kid who just got radicalized it seems.

Here's a working scanner link:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ma-rt-9-window-cam

Clicked on that link, got an advert for the Mormons - totally trolled! 

[calapine]

Just reading some profiles (guardian.co.uk and others) of the younger brother. Born in July 1993, they moved to the US 7 or 8 years ago. So when he was a 11/12 year old kid. Since then he got a stipendium, won some wrestling tournaments and even registered to vote. What drives someone to throw that all way, become a psychopathic murderer and probably never live beyond 19?

[Arthur_Parker]

Middle Class terrorism, it's quite common.

[calapine]

Yes, maybe. But what's the point?

[Engels]

Ya, England's been handling that for a while now. I think we in the US thought we were more immune to that because of our perceived greater tolerance of religious groups. Naturally, teh crezy doesn't happen simply because some hicks or chavs are mean to you in high school. It probably started at home, with ultra conservative upbringing along with later exposure to all sorts of propaganda.

[Engels]

Possible hostage situation in progress http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ma-rt-9-window-cam

[Lantyssa]

So wow, it's now likley Sunil isnt the guy eh?  Disappointing.  The Scanner had all but verified him.  Oh well.  Moving on. 
It's been said Tsarnaev has a laptop with him and might be posting, but good luck sifting through the fakes.

"Oh well?"

You (and the internet) accused the guy of murdering three people and wounding a hundred more.

"Oh. Well?"

[Arthur_Parker]

Yes, maybe. But what's the point?

There is none, they are clueless cunts latching onto to an excuse to give their pointless lives meaning.

[Engels]

Listening to this police scanner is so confusing. The codes they use make it unclear what's going on. Sometimes you hear something that should be like OMGWTF (hostage situation alluded to earlier) and then minutes pass and suddenly someone's saying to someone else 'go off duty and take some downtime'. Both on what seems to be the same channel.

[bhodi]

Speaking of, I thought this was a pretty interesting post on SA:

Guys, if you're living in the U.S. you're not getting CNN. You're getting CNN-US.

When something bad happens, CNN-US kicks the shit out of Fox. They still have the reputation of being the place to go to when shit goes down. They can't trade on partisanship like Fox or MSNBC, so they have to compete by playing up their dual reputation of impartiality and of being the first, best place to get breaking news. CNN-US is in a shitty, but necessary position. Where Fox News and MSNBC can fill their time with "this happened, here's what we think, CNN-US is stuck with "this happened, what do you think?"

CNN-US started to lose its shit after Fox News started regularly beating them in the domestic market and ever since then they've been doing everything they can to copy Fox's style. What they don't seem to get is that they are (or were, depending on your point of view) a news network that is trying to compete with an news based entertainment network. The people who watch Fox and MSNBC do so for the same reasons people watch 30 Rock, because they want a narrative. An organization that is dedicated to traditional journalism isn't going to compete with that unless something really compelling is on fire, and no amount of red, white, and blue themeing is going to change that.

I say CNN-US because the real-CNN, in terms of profits and presence, is CNN international. CNNi, the real CNN, is a behemoth that crushes its competitors (BBC, Al-Jazeera, etc) in markets that Fox News doesn't even try to compete in. That's where they make their money. Like CNN-US, they trade on non-partisanship and credible reporting. Unlike CNN-US, they don't have to compete with networks that are preaching to the choir. "America Fuck-Yeah," oddly enough, doesn't play outside of America.

Think of the way people score in basketball; 2-point field goals are high-percentage everyday stories; three-pointers are exclusives that are harder to get, but worth more; and editorializing is a slam dunk with your audience. CNN-US cannot dunk. They have to keep knocking down three-pointers if they want to keep it close, let alone win. That's why Wolf Blitzer entire job is to vamp between real reporters coming in with exclusives and hype the ones that they get. With the increasing pace of technology, their margin has diminished so they've had to take more and more risks to get breaking news and consequently, they've increased their chances of having things backfire spectacularly like it did yesterday.

CNNi plays in a league where noone can dunk. On that level playing field they're still the best in the business. They don't need to pander to the audience like CNN-US does, which is why you will never, ever see the Wolf Blitzer Comedy hour overseas. Noone outside of America saw yesterday's shit show, and that's by design. CNN-US, if anything, is a corporate-enforced stupidity quarantine zone.

[Engels]

Is CNN really that prevalent outside the US?

[Paelos]

Yes, maybe. But what's the point?

There is none, they are clueless cunts latching onto to an excuse to give their pointless lives meaning.

Yep, I don't care about why they did what they did. It's always brutal and stupid.

[Paelos]

Is CNN really that prevalent outside the US?

200m households and hotels in 200 countries.

[Engels]

I'm sure that its received by a bunch of households, but is it really that unopposed by other sources?