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Boston Marathon attack

False Flags and Roof Terrorists: Your Guide to All the Internet Horseshit


It's already begun: The wacko conspiracy theories about the Boston Marathon bombings are taking over the internet. (In fact, "it" began only 30 minutes after the explosions, when conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones pre-emptively declared it a "False Flag" attack.) Here's our rundown of the most popular—which is to say the dumbest—conspiracy theories and general internet horseshit.
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I read an item, not sure where, but someone was saying that the Boston Marathon Attack was 'staged' - fake blood and everything. There are quite a number of insane people at large in this world of ours besides the ones who create the death and injuries.:mad:
 
Whilst not discounting the possibility there is some small thread of truth in some of the 'theories' any that discount the reality of the bombs are really thoughtlessly unkind. I guess part of the age of information is the sense of divorce from the reality of some things. You sort of become numb to the parade of horrors that passes across the screen on the news (and that's 24/7 these days) so one can semi-understand where that disconnect can occur in some people between the horror and their pet fear. (Conspiracy theories are primarily fear-based - big bad government/ FBI / CIA / foreign powers / aliens are coming to 'get you' in some way)
 
Meadow337 said:
Whilst not discounting the possibility there is some small thread of truth in some of the 'theories' any that discount the reality of the bombs are really thoughtlessly unkind. I guess part of the age of information is the sense of divorce from the reality of some things. You sort of become numb to the parade of horrors that passes across the screen on the news (and that's 24/7 these days) so one can semi-understand where that disconnect can occur in some people between the horror and their pet fear. (Conspiracy theories are primarily fear-based - big bad government/ FBI / CIA / foreign powers / aliens are coming to 'get you' in some way)
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I don't know about fear based. What I find interesting is that people that push those theories have to completely ignore the facts. Perhaps that disconnect is with reality?

My favorites...

Moon landing
TWA flight 800
The Gulf War
9/11
Iran Air Flight 655
UFOs
 
Robert said:
I don't know about fear based. What I find interesting is that people that push those theories have to completely ignore the facts. Perhaps that disconnect is with reality?

My favorites...

Moon landing
TWA flight 800
The Gulf War
9/11
Iran Air Flight 655
UFOs
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Don't you think they are based in fear? I think they are .... to be a good conspiracy theorist you first have to be a little paranoid and that's certainly fear based. And all of them revolve in some way around something coming to 'get you' or the government is covering something up for some evil plot which is just a variation of the something is coming to 'get you'.

As for ignoring the facts - we all do that to some extent. Do you believe absolutely everything you have been told without exception? Or do you like the rest of us have a healthy pinch of skepticism that you aren't being told the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

The fruitloops just do it more, and in their paranoia assume that it's because something is being covered up for a nefarious reason.

(Not entirely sure I don't partially agree with that assessment. I just don't go the extra step and assume it's aliens or evil government forces. Ok wait it IS evil government forces ... just not the way conspiracy nuts think it is)

(Oh damn am I a conspiracy nut?)

:rofl

I think it's a case of you if you think you are mad, you aren't because mad people never think they are insane. YAY I'm safe :)

all that proves is sometimes the nuts are a little bit right :)


Just as an example of the type of paranoid thinking that these nuts have:

Homeland Security is telling the public, “If you see something, say something.” WELL I'M SAYING IT!!! I see corruption, evil and treason in The White House! I see corruption, evil and treason in Homeland Security! I see corruption, evil and treason in the Federal Reserve System! I'M SAYING SOMETHING!!! A nation can survive its fools, but no nation can survive treason from within.
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You can't argue with that kind of thinking, it is armoured in its own self-righteousness, impervious in its assurance, but these are the people who are also arming themselves.
 
What I discovered when I got a gun
04 May 2013 16:35 - Alex Hannaford

As the NRA celebrates its annual meeting, Alex Hannaford has been commissioned to write a story about US gun culture. So he went out and bought a gun.

The fight is not over. That's the message from the National Rifle Association (NRA), as it celebrates its annual meeting throughout the weekend in Houston, Texas. This despite the fact that the powerful lobbying group has already managed to block a pretty sensible plan to expand background checks on gun sales and a proposal to ban some semi-automatic weapons.

It's perhaps no surprise that the meeting takes place just a stone's throw from a town that boasts the largest number of concealed handgun license holders in the state and only a couple of hours' drive (not much in Texas terms) from a town, appropriately called Gun Barrel City, whose council this week urged all its residents to buy guns.

According to the Houston Chronicle, 500 firearms companies, hunting outfitters and gun antique collectors will ply their trade to a somewhat captive audience. And there's even a national prayer breakfast on the NRA's schedule, because, let's face it, in America, God and guns go together like hamburgers and fries.

I've written opinion articles before on America's obsession with guns. In one of those, I mentioned that Austin, Texas, where I live, lays claim to America's first modern-day school shooting: back in 1966, a student at the University of Texas named Charles Whitman climbed the UT Tower, a 27-storey structure on campus, and picked off people at random. In the discussion thread, a reader took me to task over the weapon I'd had Whitman using: "if you try sniping at passers-by from the top of a 27-storey tower with a sawn-off shotgun, you aren't going to get very far".

He wrote: "Minor point, but is it too much to ask that writers have some familiarity with the subject that they're writing about, rather than just having the correct prejudices?"

Minor point, but Whitman did have a sawn-off shotgun (among others). Here's the police report, but "tommyjimmy" had made a fairly accurate analysis of my experience (or lack of) with firearms: what did I really know about them other than the fact I'd shot a handgun once at a range here in Texas and a shotgun a few times in my late teens back in the UK? Since moving to the United States all I'd seen were the stats and news reports about innocent people getting needlessly mown down by devices that I believed had been designed for one purpose only. Prejudiced? Possibly.

So I went out and bought a gun.

A 9mm Sig Sauer P250 semi-automatic handgun, to be precise. And then I attended a one-day concealed handgun license course up the road from my home, which enabled me to take my gun (almost) everywhere I went, albeit squirreled away in a holster tucked into my jeans.

I had been commissioned by GQ magazine to write an in-depth story about American gun culture and under the strict rules of immersion journalism I'd, er, immersed myself. The results surprised me a little, but it was less to do with how I felt carrying the gun around (pretty stupid) and more to do with the exhaustive research I did alongside it. Here's what I learned:

1. The pro-gun brigade will have you believe that the police absolutely love concealed handgun license holders. Spoiler, if you're about to read the feature I wrote: they don't.

2. Where I live in Austin, there are about 82 home invasions a year – in a city of 820 000 people. You're far more likely to be injured by your own gun than to need one to use against somebody breaking in at night.

(Wow really???)

3. Concealed handgun license holders are mostly white, middle-class men who want to defend against people and places they perceive as dangerous – especially ethnic minority men. Actually, this one wasn't much of a surprise.

(and I was wrong about guns being about fear? Pshah!)

4. I actually enjoyed target shooting, and, afterwards, taking my gun apart and cleaning it. It's pretty therapeutic.

(Target shooting is fun, I just don't see why you need a weapon that can bring down an armoured vehicle to do it. A peashooter would provide just as much fun in aiming and hitting the target, if your mindset was different.)

5. More of my Texas friends (Democrat, Libertarian and Republican alike) had guns than I'd thought.

6. So-called assault rifles like the AR-15 are also manufactured and sold in Britain. It's perfectly legal for someone living in Croydon, for example, to own an AR-15 – if he or she has a UK licence for target shooting.

(And if you have a gun license in the UK it shows up on all the police scanners so if you are stopped for a traffic violation or approached for any reason, if you have a gun license, you are treated with far more care and suspicion than 'regular' non-gun owning citizens - and that was straight from the horse's mouth so to speak)

This last piece of information I found particularly astonishing; and I wrote a follow-up piece explaining why attacks from the left in Europe often miss their target due to a complete lack of knowledge about guns and gun laws in their own countries, let alone in the United States; that some people railing against the availability of assault rifles, which are so often demonised in the gun debate, lived in countries like the UK where the same guns are actually manufactured and sold to civilians.

The difference is that, in the UK, we don't license guns for use in the killing of other human beings as they do in the US. I'm not being facetious either. On my concealed handgun licence course, we learned how hollow-point bullets (that you can buy from Walmart, incidentally) are designed to expand when they meet flesh, causing maximum, bloody, damage. Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, used this sort of ammunition.

(Ammo like this needs to be banned, there is no non-violent, non-lethal use for it. It is designed to kill. You can't shoot targets with it, you can't go out and kill game with it - it's sole purpose is to inflict maximum physical damage on another human being)

The research I did for those stories also reinforced my belief that it's a very vocal minority in America whose affection for the right to bear arms isn't anything to do with hunting or target shooting. It's about arming themselves to the teeth so they can rise up against an oppressive government should the need arise. Because, you know, that kind of thing happens a lot in America. And they're going to be really effective against the most powerful military force in the world, if the need should ever arise.

(Logic has and never will come into it. These people are fearful of the government - telling them that they won't prevail flies in the face of American History where a bunch of farmers beat off the might of the British and by golly gum they are ready to do it again if necessary)

It'd be funny if it wasn't so frightening. Up until the Newtown, Connecticut massacre, these were voices that many outside the United States fortunately hadn't heard all that often. But I'm actually glad they now have. In the past, when there hadn't been a school shooting for a while, this constituency just felt like a joke; but now, everyone can see that they have the ability to prevent common-sense measures designed to stem the tide of gun violence here in America.

So, if, for the NRA, the fight is "not yet over", and we accept that they're a powerful-enough lobbying force to stop these sensible proposals going through Congress at any time in the future, is there anything we can still do?

Actually, there may be a couple of things. My friend Tara Murtha, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Weekly, is also a volunteer at the Gun Crisis Reporting Project, which was started by a Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist Jim MacMillan. This is where that banal term "raising awareness" actually means something. On average, over the last 25 years, one person has been murdered in Tara and Jim's home city every day – and more than three-quarters of those were by a gun.

The Gun Crisis Reporting Project refers to murder by gunfire in Philadelphia as an epidemic, and looks at gun violence from a public health perspective. The project also humanises victims of gun violence. As Tara says, with shrinking newsrooms, local papers can't cover all the gun violence that happens so frequently, and not all shootings are fatal despite the fact they all help traumatise communities. Much of this violence has become invisible, explains Tara:

"So we report on the memorials of the victims; we profile them and talk to the community. A daily newspaper may say 'a 23-year-old black man has been shot in the head at 7th and Fairfield', but Gun Crisis will take pictures of the memorial service, talk to his family and quote organisations working to reduce gun violence."

The Gun Crisis project also has active Twitter feeds – one solely for Philadelphia and one for the US as a whole. Both are like aggregators of gun crime, never letting their followers forget just how rampant it is. Today in California, a "child shot at Bell Ridge Apartments is stable"; on Tuesday, in Kentucky, a five-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed his two-year-old sister.

That's not to say we shouldn't focus on mass shootings, which the FBI defines as four or more victims, but we're definitely under-focused on the rest of gun crime in the States. A daily shooting resulting in death in Philadelphia is so commonplace that it rarely makes the news, as Jim MacMillan says:

"Ninety-nine percent of those shot to death in the US are not shot in mass shootings … There's no novelty; no deviation from the norm, and in a daily deadline sense I'm hard-pressed to argue with that."

But, he tells me, the real story is the bigger picture – this picture of the epidemic it has become.

"Nobody is suggesting we should be less attentive to Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine or Sandy Hook. But we need to look for innovative solutions to the epidemic of gun violence while avoiding the polarising debate."

Jim says the most promising development has come from the worlds of public health and criminology. And this is the metaphor of gun violence as disease – imposed on communities when certain socioeconomic factors some into play: lack of good schools, lack of opportunity, illegal drugs.

"In any community in the world, you'd have same result. And when researchers looked at the statistical pattern, they discovered outbreaks of diseases like smallpox and cholera looked pretty much same – but instead of bacterial transmission, the transmission here is in the violent act."

A model that seems to work at addressing the problem as a public health issue can be found in Chicago. Cure Violence uses methods associated with disease control – detection; identifying people involved in transmission; changing social norms in the societies where it occurs – in order to change it.

It employs people it calls "violence interrupters" and "outreach behaviour change agents", which Jim says are often men who have themselves been violent in the past, who are able to gain credibility with the people they're talking to. "Credible messengers", he calls them; people who "offer basic conflict resolution; let them know they have alternatives":

"Often, these people feel [gun violence] is a last resort, but giving them a cooling-off period may stop them pulling the trigger."

According to Cure Violence, these methods have directly been responsible for a reduction in shootings and killings in the specific neighbourhoods in which they've been employed – by up to 34%. But according to MacMillan, they're under-used: cities tend to spend a thousand times more on law enforcement and medical response than on prevention.

Politicians keep talking about trying to do something about gun violence. But while the NRA and its fans are successfully thwarting those attempts at every turn, at least some people aren't content with waiting until the smoke clears. – © Guardian News and Media 2013
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I thought the bit about treating gun violence as a disease and combating it pro-actively was interesting.
 
Meadow337 said:
I thought the bit about treating gun violence as a disease and combating it pro-actively was interesting.
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Treating violence in our culture as a disease is a good approach if you can get people to agree to how this disease is propagated.
 
lol well you know my opinion on that already - violence creates violence

Come on a visit to any playground will tell you our base instinct on being confronted with violence is either fight - we whomp em back or flight - fear gets the better of us so we run. Although I'm pretty sure its also fear (anger is a form of fear) that makes us fight back.
 
Meadow337 said:
lol well you know my opinion on that already - violence creates violence

Come on a visit to any playground will tell you our base instinct on being confronted with violence is either fight - we whomp em back or flight - fear gets the better of us so we run. Although I'm pretty sure its also fear (anger is a form of fear) that makes us fight back.
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Maybe, but you can't lump all violence into one neat category like that. When I was young, the kids that bullies picked on were the kids they thought they could easily best. Like you, I am a peaceful person at heart, so I avoided fights. Boys would mark me for an easy target and pile it on. I put it end to it by trashing a guy in the locker room after gym class. The coach had to pull off the guy. Once they figured out that I wasn't an easy target, they quit and moved on; probably to pick on someone else. My brother had a similar experience. People that want to be violent are going to be, so it's best to be prepared. I am a serious believer of Theodore Roosevelt's "walk softly and carry a big stick."

I for one don't have any intention of committing a violent act, but I won't hesitate if someone comes after me or family.
 
Meadow337 said:
how much violence were those bullies exposed to at home :)
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I couldn't tell you. Their need to be violent could have been problems at home or a low self-esteem or any any of dozens of reasons. All I knew was that his reason wasn't reason enough for me to be a victim.

It was different in those days. I didn't even get in trouble for fighting in school.
 
I absolutely agree with you on not agreeing to be a victim but that is a whole other discussion is it not?
 
Robert said:
I don't think so. The reason many people own firearms is because they have decided they don't want to be a victim.
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Of the dozens upon dozens of people I have asked, few have said "for self-defense". The answers are normally either hunters, enjoy shooting, enjoy modding, enjoy owning, are anxiously awaiting the time to overthrow the government, or some combination of those. "Self-defense" comes out low on the list.

Maybe I am asking the wrong people?
 
that goes to my assertion guns are about fear, not choosing not to be a victim. There are countless ways to stop being a victim that don't include violence or preparing for violence
 
Meadow337 said:
that goes to my assertion guns are about fear, not choosing not to be a victim. There are. ountless ways to stop being a victim that don't include violence or preparing for violence
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I disagree. Am I not responsible for the safety of my family? I don't know how much time it takes for the police to respond to 911 where you live, but here it can easily take more time then a criminal needs to victimize a family and get out. Catching them later because one of the neighbors got a plate number isn't enough; family cannot be replaced.

Gun control measures is nothing more then treating the symptoms. If you want to reduce violent crime, then treating violence like a disease makes more sense. I'll be most gun owners would be happy if the only time they took their gun out is when they took it to the gun range for practice.
 
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