Terrorist attack; at least 36 dead, 40 hurt

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Patroklos


And my point is about exaggeration. Of all the problems the world has today, reductionism is not one of them. Grossly magnifying the impact of every occurance is rampant.

Reductionism is not minimilization of anything. Reductionism is the belief that you can understand a thing by reducing it to its parts - you can understand a society by looking at inviduals, or human body by looking at cells, or a cell by looking at atoms.

at the lower levels, reductionism can be powerful within limits - molecular biology is great, although the most powerful ideas in biology in biology like evolution were found by looking at animals, not by looking at DNA (that came later). Similarly looking at organizations by analyzing the motives of individuals within them (as economics often does) can be very fruitful, but to pretend an organization is just the sum of papers, and of individual activities, misses a lot. Living things, organizations, societies, are organized things, not just sums of their components, and viewing them as sums of their components will always miss the impact of disruptions to organizations.

And yes, I know that certain forms of non-hierarchal linkage, of which the internet is a good example, reduce the impact of disorganizing events. I dont think we're close to being as far along on that as you imply, and we were less far in 2001.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Arrian


So,

India = apple tree
Islam = fungus

Solution = "fungicide"

...

This is really ugly, aneeshm.

-Arrian

No. Here's how I see it:

Radical Islam = fungus.

Fungicide = highly efficient investigation and extermination of terrorists and people who provide logistical support to terrorists.

Apple tree = everything that is good in this world.

[aneeshm]

If an American major city ever got nuked, then I will watch on with sadness, and just a little bit of unholy glee, as I see the entire Middle East being turned into one giant slab of glass. Sadness that it had to end this way, and glee that it was finally ending.

I will then feel extremely guilty about that momentary pang of glee when I see the suffering of the innocents involved.














I think I over-analyse, and I know myself far too well.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Kontiki
Patty, I'm not going to go into a line by line response to your post. Suffice it to say, you seem to not quite grasp that interconnected does not equal interchangable. Perhaps its a military midset where you train for interchangability, I don't know. But the rest of the world doesn't work like that.

Things do work better in a crisis in the military. I think he's saying that if things worked like they do in the military attacks wouldn't do as much damage.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by aneeshm
If an American major city ever got nuked, then I will watch on with sadness, and just a little bit of unholy glee, as I see the entire Middle East being turned into one giant slab of glass. Sadness that it had to end this way, and glee that it was finally ending.

I will then feel extremely guilty about that momentary pang of glee when I see the suffering of the innocents involved.

You're getting to be quite the troll. I don't believe you.

[LordShiva]

Police also disclosed that they had defused 19 more bombs hidden in plastic bags at bus stops, cinemas, road junctions and pedestrian bridges across the city.

The blasts on Saturday - one in a restaurant and another during a laser show at an outdoor auditorium - were the latest in a series of attacks on Indian cities since 2001.

If all the bombs had detonated, police believe they would have dwarfed even the worst of the recent attacks – the multiple train bombings in Bombay that killed 186 last year.

“They could have killed hundreds,” Balwinder Singh, Hyderabad’s police commissioner, told reporters. “We have launched a manhunt for those who committed this dastardly crime.”

Hyderabad is considered a high-pro-file target because it is a centre of India’s burgeoning information technology industry, and is now home to dozens of top Western companies and many foreign executives.

The attack appears to have been designed to provoke a fresh bout of violence between Hindus and Muslims in the city of 6.5 million people, which has one of India’s largest Muslim communities.

India’s population of 1.1 billion is 80 per cent Hindu and about 13 per cent Muslim, but Hyderabad - the 16th-century capital of the Muslim Qutb Shahi dynasty - is more than 40 per cent Muslim.

[Kataphraktoi]

Re: Terrorist attack; at least 36 dead, 40 hurt

Originally posted by aneeshm
IBNLive Link



What are we going to DO about this? We never do ANYTHING. Our people die, and we just watch on, apathetic. The government doesn't care, it never cares. The people don't care either. We've bled for more than twenty years, and it just doesn't stop. And all those who can make a difference never actually DO anything.

Why don't we ever actually LISTEN to the terrorists for once? We all dismiss them as motivated by this or that. Do we ever actually hear what they say they are doing this for? Do we bother to ever consider the possibility that they may be SINCERE? Unless we do that, how do we ever expect to be able to take concrete action, to deal with this threat, this menace, this evil?

But life will go on. The police will catch a few suspects, find out more, the media will raise a frenzy about "minority persecution", then a few years later, the perpetrators will be caught, given a life sentence, or the death penalty, the human rights organisations will raise a ruckus about the human rights of the people who did this, the case will drag on, and all will be forgotten, and then there will be another attack. But life will go on. Apathetic.

Why do you need to do anything? You have a billion plus people. Winnar

[Arrian]

If an American major city ever got nuked, then I will watch on with sadness, and just a little bit of unholy glee, as I see the entire Middle East being turned into one giant slab of glass

Seek help.

-Arrian

[Shrapnel12]

I agree that the impact of terrorist attacks is minimal in terms of numbers. I agree that even a nuke attack against one city would mean little in the large term of things. When we say this, we are dismissing the emotional impact of course, but I submit that dismissing this impact is the same as dismissing the fact that we need blood in our bodies to live. Until we are a civilization of Vulcans, our emotion, irrationality, and perception is what really matters. Mass intense emotional trauma is as effective as any physical damage. Even if what you're saying is not wrong, it's still a silly point to bring up.

[lord of the mark]

"Police also disclosed that they had defused 19 more bombs hidden in plastic bags at bus stops, cinemas, road junctions and pedestrian bridges across the city."

Indian police

[Arrian]

[aneeshm]

Well, yes.

[LordShiva]

Indeed. So far, they've seemed to have done a better job than teh Mumabi cops after teh train bombings, who, sensibly enough, asked all witnesses to come in and tell them what they saw, but then treated Muslim witnesses as suspects and held some of them simply for being Muslim and in teh area when teh bombs went off. I don't know if this is teh kind of "swift and harsh response to terrorism" that some like to see, but it helps achieve exactly what teh bombers want (i.e. creating a Hindu-Muslim divide).

[Arrian]

Funny how that works, eh?

But you know, you gotta be careful with fungi.

-Arrian

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Patroklos
In 30 years the ME will be exactly what it was for most of human history. Sand. And they can have all they want.

Nah. Up till about 1200 AD, it was a heartland of civilization. Soon as we disinvent most of the agricultural and navigational improvements of the last 1000+ years, it will be again.