General Election June 8

[adam2]

Another van plows into pedestrians in London. This one appears to be a revenge attack on Muslims near a mosque. So far no reports of fatalities.

Later reports state one dead, and yes it does look like a revenge attack.

[UndercoverElephant]

Another van plows into pedestrians in London. This one appears to be a revenge attack on Muslims near a mosque. So far no reports of fatalities.

I am amazed it has taken this long until the attacks started going the other way. Doesn't have much to do with the general election though. I'm not sure the recent Islamic attacks did either.

[Lord Beria3]

Well, a tragic attack but hardly surprising.

Nearly 15 years of Islamist terror attacks on the Western world would lead to a violent backlash from the more extreme end of the indigenous population.

If a Christian minority in a Muslim society repeatedly slaughtered Muslims in the name of Christ, do you not think the locals would react by counter-atrocities? In fact, Islamists regularly pogrom innocent Christians even when they have done nothing wrong in the Middle East.

An eye for an eye, as the Israelis would say.

Sectarianism is coming to the West... we face a fully fledged Islamist urban insurgency in western Europe.

https://20committee.com/2017/06/04/ther ... -of-blood/

The reality which European politicians refuse to face is that there is no intelligence solution to the jihadist problem which now exists in Britain and France, which possess large populations of angry Muslims, a certain percentage of whom are truly radical.

This is, at root, a numbers game. Britain’s intelligence and policing operation devoted to counterterrorism is efficient and skilled, yet utterly dwarfed by the scope of the threat. As The Times reported last week, British intelligence estimates that the number of jihadists in the country is a staggering 23,000 people—of whom something like 3,000 pose a potentially imminent threat to public safety.

Moreover, even if the number of potential terrorists requiring close watching by the secret state is “only” 3,000, that target pool vastly exceeds the capabilities of British intelligence. Although little understood by the public, maintaining effective 24/7 human and technical surveillance is enormously costly in manpower and resources, even for top-notch security services like MI5. A good rule of thumb is you need two dozen operatives to closely watch one suspect. In other words, it’s severely challenging for British cops and spooks to keep even 300 potential terrorists under constant surveillance—much less 10 times that number.

For all their skills, British counterterrorism professionals cannot stop every would-be terrorist. That’s actuarially impossible. Neither is this problem new. Some 15 years ago, when I was working on a joint counterterrorism operation with British partners, they explained how they were overwhelmed since the number of potential jihadists in one particular metro area they fretted over came to about 3,000—which was roughly the size of MI5’s entire operational workforce.

It speaks volumes about the effectiveness of British cops and spooks that more innocent Britons haven’t been murdered by the thousands of jihadists living among them. However, the terrible reality the United Kingdom faces is that mass-casualty terrorist attacks are becoming the “new normal”—another unfortunate fact of life which angry and scared citizens are supposed to take in stride, like bad weather or traffic congestion.

http://observer.com/2016/03/europe-is-again-at-war/

Europe is now at war again. The threat today is less terrorism than a low-grade insurgency, a guerrilla war of sorts, that hangs over much of the continent as thousands of jihadists, made proficient killers by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, return home with visions of killing “infidels,” their former neighbors. There will be no parley or negotiation with such mass murderers. Parsing the death-cult ideology that drives ISIS fighters, with the hope of making it less noxious, makes as much sense as trying to divine the finer political points of the Manson family.

We should expect more guerrilla-like attacks like Brussels yesterday: moderate in scale, relatively easy to plan and execute against soft targets, and utterly terrifying to the public. At some point, angry Europeans, fed up with their supine political class, will begin to strike back, and that’s when the really terrifying scenarios come into play. European security services worry deeply about the next Anders Breivik targeting not fellow Europeans, but Muslim migrants. “We’re just one Baruch Goldstein away from all-out war,” explained a senior EU terrorism official, citing the American-born Israeli terrorist, fed up with Palestinian violence, who walked into a Hebron mosque in 1994, guns blazing, and murdered 29 innocent Muslims.

When that violence comes, a practically disarmed Europe will be all but powerless to stop it. To take the case of Belgium, at the Cold War’s end a generation ago, its army had seven brigades with 18 infantry battalions, plus some 30 more battalions in the reserve. Today, Belgium’s army has only two brigades and six infantry battalions, some 3,000 bayonets in all. That tiny force would have trouble exerting control over even one bumptious Brussels neighborhood in the event of serious crisis.

[johnhemming2]

I am amazed it has taken this long until the attacks started going the other way.

There were anti-Muslim attacks in Birmingham a couple of years ago. An elderly gentleman was murdered in the street and bombs were laid. The culprit was Ukrainian, however, not British.

[fuzzy]

Get with the program John, it's just 1 great big onion. No borders, no limits..

[Little John]

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk ... -new-times

...Crises, great turning points, new conjunctures, new forms of consciousness are by definition incubators of the new. That is one of the great sources of their fascination. We can now see the line of linkage between the thousands of young people who gave Corbyn his overwhelming victory in the leadership election in 2015 and the millions of young people who were enthused by his general election campaign in 2017. It is no accident that it was the young rather than the middle-aged or the seniors who were in the vanguard: the young are the bearers and products of the new, they are the lightning conductors of change. Their elders, by contrast, are steeped in old ways of thinking and doing, having lived through and internalised the values and norms of neoliberalism for more than 30 years....

[woodburner]

Time to split this topic, the last few posts have little direct connection with the election, except if you have a conspiracy theory.

[Lord Beria3]

Time to split this topic, the last few posts have little direct connection with the election, except if you have a conspiracy theory.

A bit confused by the conspiracy theory comment.

But agreed, should get back to the British politics scene.

[Lord Beria3]

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... ent-wrong/

My thoughts on the British general election result.

[RenewableCandy]

FWIW, Glastonbury loves Corby

OhJeremyCorbyn

[Lord Beria3]

FWIW, Glastonbury loves Corby

OhJeremyCorbyn

The English upper middle classes love the Jezza!

[Potemkin Villager]

As a result of the dirty deal done with the dupers today it looks as if the price of "democracy" is about £10 million + per vote!

You can't put too high a price on democracy.

[Lord Beria3]

Politics has always been a dirty pork barrel business.

In 2009 Brown was looking at a DUP deal to keep the Tories out. It's politics.

[cubes]

As a result of the dirty deal done with the dupers today it looks as if the price of "democracy" is about £10 million + per vote!

You can't put too high a price on democracy.

It's ok when it's other people's money...

[RenewableCandy]

FWIW, Glastonbury loves Corby

OhJeremyCorbyn

The English upper middle classes love the Jezza!

Precisely!!

That's why all the tories (and folk like you) are so scathing about the Glasto crowd. Though many will be poor kids who've scrimped-and-saved (or indeed volunteered: that's how you can get in for nowt), a lot will be in what's left of the middle classes. When those folk - the middle class - turn against a government, its days are truly numbered.

You are fighting for your life. And you know it. So you try mockery.

And now even that isn't working.

(disclaimer: I am middle class)