Current events - Guidelines 1st Post.

[Cassowary]

I thought maybe I should make a thread on this so there could be viable discussion / news postings rather than the scattered discussion in the HWYD thread.

On Monday, two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. It has been confirmed there are three dead, and at least 100 injured.

Since then, there has been... a lot going on. Currently I am following news as it tracks a couple of suspects. One has been shot by the police, the other is on the loose.

A few links with more information:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... s/2096123/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi- ... 9233.story
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/19/us/boston ... index.html

Thoughts on this occurrence?

[missshadedlove]

The MIT college I Boston is being hold up and all by one of the bomb suspects. To be more specific the guy in the white hat.

[Cassowary]

I thought he was shot already? Or was that the other guy?

Too many things happening, just can't keep up.

Edit: Okay, so it's White Hat who is still alive, Black Hat was shot.

[feralkiwi]

As someone living in the greater boston area (locked down! in my house. sigh. at least we have internet), I'd say i've been getting the best information from wbur.org (boston's local npr station). they have a live stream of the coverage and they seem to be the best about fact checking (unlike say cnn).

this week just kind of sucks, honestly. it's so surreal. this sort of thing *doesn't* happen in boston.

[Cassowary]

Yeah, a lot of major media outfits have been doing not so well. No vetting of information, just drawing upon other sources that are equally unvetted, e.g. Reddit.

I don't really get that though, terrorist targets will be large cities, and Boston is pretty notable, especially what with how full of history it is.

[rigbymad12]

All I can say is this is horrible.

[Cassowary]

The last suspect was caught alive, so that's a good thing at least.

I really commend the BPD for how well they've done their jobs.

Oddity - no groups have claimed responsibility. I find this shocking, honestly.

[missshadedlove]

yeah I am happy they caught the guy..FINALLY. he is 19 yrs old and he is throwing his life away.

[Intempestivity]

Oddity - no groups have claimed responsibility. I find this shocking, honestly.

It's not that odd. It seems like the suspects led a very difficult life as refugees. Add to that emigrating to a new country that has totally different ideals to your own at a time in life when you're struggling to find yourself, and you not only have an identity crisis but a nationality crisis. Throw in a bit of an unstable mind, and you have the recipe for a person (or people) who think(s) that the best way to draw attention to what they think is wrong in the world is to damage the people in it. The elder brother (the one who was killed) said several years ago that he doesn't understand Americans, and he thinks that people have no value systems or self control anymore. It's not implausible to think that these could have been the beginnings of some sort of warped ideology revolving around Americans being a large part of what is wrong with the world.

I mean, just look at Ted Kaczynski. He was a one-man terrorist, not affiliated with any large organisation, and he deployed sixteen bombs in seventeen years because he felt the government was destroying both nature/wildlife and human freedoms.

Just because it was a bombing and not a mass shooting doesn't necessarily make it odd that it was a single person or a very small group behind it; not every terrorist act is affiliated with world-wide or well known terrorist organisations.

[TxCat]

This belongs in our current events thread; I'll move it for you.

-- TxCat, moderator HoS