Explosion in Oslo

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

No threads here yet?
It looks like a very big explosion, one fatality reported so far. May be terrorism but bbc saying that is speculation.

It is so awful that the future of all the poor young teenagers has been so cruelly taken away from them.For the parents ,how will they go on ? This is just so terrible,i just cant comprehend that someone can be so bloody evil.

Norway,i send you my deepesy sympathy for your losses.

I found the Sky news coverage extremely distasteful tonight...very intrusive and insensitive. The pictures were not repeated on the BBC, thank goodness. I have switched over permanently.

Feeling sick about the whole thing. So sad.

Media are now being criticized for putting lives in danger - it turns out that some journalists called or texted youths who were trying to hide while the gunman was still shooting. In all the papers people were told not to contact their loved ones because it could reveal their position - and then journalists went and did it anyway, to get news. At least one person has apologized and said that he thought the person he tried to call was on the mainland. But still.

Oh God, I so hope that's not true

This is just utterly horrific. It is beyond belief. My thoughts are with everyone affected by this awful thing.

BadBagel

DOn'T FFS Me. LIke everyone else, I am seriously disturbed by what has happened, but honestly? I'm not surprised. Men are trained to be killers. THe media trains them. Society trains them. The military trains them. Then everyone gets shocked , shocked when one of them actually follows through on his training and goes ahead and kills.

I think it's really really important to look at this if we want to stop these horrors from happening.

I, for one, do not believe they have to be inevitable. I believe these men are the products of culture.

WHAT ELSE CAN I BELIEVE? THat, this is just "one of those things"? THat we all have to accept that "this is just what men do"

Sorry, no I can't.

I believe there are cultural influences behind these actions.

It is obviously an unusual occurrence, or we wouldn't be seeing it as news. Given that we are all part of our "culture", and generally don't act like this, I can't see that it's useful or relevant to start making assumptions.

I think the only appropriate response at this time is to offer sympathy, and feel sadness at the loss of life. Anything else really smacks of distorting events into an agenda, which is premature and opportunistic.

The scary thing is, though, that some of the comments to articles in a Norwegian newspaper go like this:

'This is a terrible tragedy, of course, but this is what happens when people don't get to speak their mind. People on the right have been ridiculed and silenced for too long. It's not surprising that someone eventually acts out.'

So, while condemning his acts, some people out there actually seem to think that he may have had a point.

Another newspaper has published parts of his 'manifesto', where he sees himself as 1) a hero throughout Europe, 2) the saviour of the European people, and 3) the saviour of European Christianity.

No less.

sakura Men are not the only ones to commit violent acts. As for cultural influences being to blame, if they were really so awful and pervasive we'd get far more events like these. But we don't. Thank god.

'As culture and op-ed editor of Norway's major newspaper, every week I read contributions which are rhetorically and politically not too unlike the blog posts written by the 32-year-old man who is now in custody, charged with the bomb explosion and the massacre. These articles more often than not contain extremely strong accusations against the political establishment and the media ? for tearing our society apart and destroying Norwegian values and society as they knew them.'

Knut Olav Åmås in the Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/23/norway-attacks-oslo-explosion-massacre

To say that the media didn't influence this man is to truly put your head in the sand.

You mean he's never watched TV? Never? Not even as a child?
If you turn on the TV tonight and there's a 100% chance you'll end up watching a man commiting an act of violence.

WHy do some men follow through on this conditioning and end up killing, while others don't, I suppose is a question worth asking.

But to say that men are not conditioned by society and the media to be violent is silly.

Obviously. But that is not the element that distinguishes or illuminates anything, or it wouldn't be so rare.

The camp was for the youth of the sitting political party, which favours women?s rights.
One of the politicicans, a woman, had recently given a speech on women?s rights, violence against women.
The shooter was a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian

It's also possible he was on a drug such as SSRI, which is known to trigger this type of erratic i.e bloody murderous behaviour among young men.

I also think that men hope to become notorious when they commit these crimes. They are not punished properly, so most think it's worth it.

Give this man to the mothers of the teenagers who were killed and let's see what happens to him then. BUt no. We're not allowed. We have to let him go through the courts, courts where men get let off for violent crimes such as murder all the time. The average sentence for a wife-murderer in the UK is 4 years > The average sentence for a rape is,.. oh wait, most rapes aren't even reported.

What, pray tell me, is discouraging these men from committing crimes? The male "justice" system? LOL

It's not as rare as you think BitOfFun.
Two women a week are murdered by their spouse in the UK alone. I don't need to go into details of other atrocities.
Male violence is an epidemic. Politicians are barely addressing it. If anything they're covering it up with ungendered language and media lies about women being safer at home than out on the streets. Not true if there's a man in the house.

Sakura this is not a gender issue. You can't shoehorn your perspective onto this and claim that he did it because he is a man there are female terrorists too, TV does not make people shoot children and domestic violence has nothing to do with it.

This is what bigotry and an obsession with making the world how you want it to be looks like. This is conversion by the sword, believe what I do, think like me and support me or die if you oppose my beliefs.
No remorse from the killer, he will see it as a necessary cleansing. This sort of hatred has been seen over thousands of years, usually by men.
But my fear would be that if women were in the same positions of control that men are now, the brutalities and hatred wouldn't stop, the targets would be redefined. I think it is the worst side of human behaviour, not male alone.

Mass shooting sprees may be relatively rare, but I think it's unwise to ignore the fact that almost 100% of them are committed by males - or that male violence in general is not rare at all, but pervasive. Something is going on there and it's not going to do us any good to bury our heads in the sand about it. If mass shooting sprees were committed almost exclusively by females I have no doubt that we'd be asking what it is about women that makes them do it.

"What, pray tell me, is discouraging these men from committing crimes?"

Plenty discourages people from committing crimes. Mostly the civilising influence of being part of a wider community of human society. It's backed up by law enforcement but the vast majority never get to that stage - we self-regulate by and large. We therefore don't 'train men to be killers' but certain men and women evolve that way for reasons best known to themselves and are not able to self-regulate. Fanaticism is particularly dangerous when pursuing strongly held beliefs means other people become dispensible. And we can't discount psychiatric issues... I expect we'll find this particular man is a sociopath or a psychopath at heart.

He may not be ripped apart by the mothers of the dead - the solution you'd obviously favour - but, after his 5 minutes of fame, he'll be consigned to prison. We progress as a society by punishing the barbarism of our worse members, not by copying it.

Goodness, Sakura, I am glad i don't live in your world! Where barbarism would be punished by more barbarism.

Thank heavens for a civilised response in the face of extreme bloody violence.

I don't call 21 years adequate punishment though, which is apparently the maximum penalty for any crime in Norway. Not unless they try him for the 2 crimes separately and then run the sentences one after the other.

MigratingCoconuts "Where barbarism would be punished by more barbarism"

The "softly softly" approach that society has been using towards violent men ain't working

The law is set up to PREVENT sadistic and violent men from receving adequate punishments. IN the UK a man gets an average of 4 years for killing his wife, but a woman gets more than that for retaliating against an abuser.

Is society serious about stopping these men from committing these crimes?

At the moment, I would say No. Nobody in the media is even pointing out that this is just another incidence of cowardly MALE violence.

IF he was taken to the city square where the mothers of the teenagers he murdered could do what they wanted to him, strip him naked, castrate then shoot him, I'm sure that would make the NEXT man planning devious little schemes in his bedroom would THINK TWICE.

GoblinChild,

Retaliation against evil is NOT the same as just taking it upon yourself to do away with 92 kids.

I am talking about retaliation. Retribution for the crimes these men commit.

If you cannot tell the difference between a woman's desire to retaliate against evil, and evil itself, then we really are in more of a pickle than I though,

Good god,

Are people here serious when they say that punishing a man adequately for an evil crime is the SAME THING as a man just deciding to kill nearly 100 teenagers, for kicks.

I was thinking of a future world where women were in the same positions of power that men are in now, sakura. A matriarchy rather than a patriarchy.
Rather than individual retaliation for a specific crime.