What on earth is an appropriate response...

[goat starer]

Mostly 15mm sci fi... Tomorrows war, star grunt. Free zombie games... The odd big of rune quest inspired stuff.

And I have to say most wargames seem terribly peaceful.

[Griffin NoName]

I know one can't compare.....

But 2000 dead in Nigeria -boko harem massacre 10th Jan

I can't help comparing the response in France and the EU and the US to smaller atrocities here. I just think we have somehow inured ourselves to these genocides and certainly I've never heard of any of the countries suffering this way holding mass protests, memorials, flowers, candles, in the way we do it in the west................... they just die or run instead.

Someone can put me right on this if they disagree. Please?

[goat starer]

I know one can't compare.....

But 2000 dead in Nigeria -boko harem massacre 10th Jan

I can't help comparing the response in France and the EU and the US to smaller atrocities here. I just think we have somehow inured ourselves to these genocides and certainly I've never heard of any of the countries suffering this way holding mass protests, memorials, flowers, candles, in the way we do it in the west................... they just die or run instead.

Someone can put me right on this if they disagree. Please?

Closeness to home and familiarity are powerful things... We should probably care about all equally but like it or not there is a hierarchy - family, friends, your home town, country, places you are familiar with, everyone else. Without it the world might well be unbearable.

Those countries don't have the tine or resource to do the big shows of public outrage / grief... They are too busy living.

There is also the fact of unusualness... We kind of expect terrible stories from Africa. Not so much from Paris.

[Griffin NoName]

Thank Goodness. Someone else is questioning it.

Why did the world ignore Boko Haram's Baga attacks?

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

What Goat said, it is to be expected if the stuff happens in South Sudan or Syria, or Yemen (that one rarely goes on the news for the scale of what happens there), but there are other elements at play. Chances are that more people die violently in the Banlieue close to Paris than in this incident, but youth's dying in a poor neighborhood isn't worth showing anywhere but the 11 PM local news. In some cases, -like how many black men die at the hands of the police every year in the US- there is a political component to censorship and/or deliberate misinformation (ie, the police not gathering/releasing the statistics to save face).

In the case of Nigeria, the silence of the Nigerian government is deafening. The president doesn't care what happens in the north (more muslims, less xtians than the south), has systemic corruption at all levels (he has taken millions for himself plus grabbing some juicy oil contracts also), and is facing elections soon so showcasing incompetence wouldn't help his chances. That silence in turn becomes silence in the West (or should I say North?) because if they don't care about their own, why should we?

Finally, there is this inherent tribal thing in which more than 21000 reported cases of ebola are some sort of curiosity, but a couple of sick individuals in the West are reason to close air routes, screen everybody, and generally speaking, go into panic mode. Who cares if some poor [I'm going to say] souls die of a very nasty hemorrhagic fever in west Africa, but god forbid a white person gets sick of it.

As Goat said: me, family, friends, town, country, and those places you are somehow related to (which is why travel is such a powerful thing).

[Griffin NoName]

No reason for not questioning it. All the more reason to question it.

Also, soon we will have mass immigration from lands made uninhabitable by climate change and it looks like Europe will become more and more popular. So it won't be over there, it will be over here.

[Aggie]

Also, soon we will have mass immigration from lands made uninhabitable by climate change and it looks like Europe will become more and more popular. So it won't be over there, it will be over here.

Climate change, and the traditional cause of violence in one's homeland.  That's why I'm here, a few generations later.  I guess immigration has been more normalized in North America than in traditional monocultures like Europe*. I wonder how the experience of being an immigrant differs between the two places?


_{*mind you, the First Nations here are still pretty pissed off at the second wave of immigrants that showed up.  Not sure how they view the newest ones.}

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

We live in Interesting Times, for sure.

Back before the Intertubes?  We got our "news" filtered for our "protection".   Sure, the Journalists had more integrity back then, but they had their blind spots and biases too.  Maybe not as obvious as some we see today.

But with the Al Gore's Intertubes?  We can look, if we want, to any part of the globe for news of What's What.

And we see that mostly, What's What is humans are still busy killing each other over the stupidest and most trifling of reasons:
  "Never rub the blue belly-button jelly clockwise you heretic!"

Will this ever change?  I certainly hope so! 

Ironically these self-same InterTubes can help with that-- by exposing people to new ideas, different than their own.  Such exposure tends to make them more tolerant of those counter-clockwise belly-rubbing heathen.

Meantime?  We have more killings...

... what worries me?  Is the invention of cheap mass conversion. 

Yes, I mean as an energy source-- that little E=MC2 stuff. 

The human race isn't mature enough for such a liberation of energy-- with cheap mass conversion?  Those little clockwise-only natives could not only blow up the anti-clockwise tribe next door?  But their entire country and everyone else along with... !!!

*sigh*

[Griffin NoName]

_{*mind you, the First Nations here are still pretty pissed off at the second wave of immigrants that showed up.  Not sure how they view the newest ones.}

First wave immigrants tend to pull the drawbridge up behind them - a second wave may well make the host country more hostile, too many of them, taking jobs etc.

From the The National Archives - http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/census/events/britain4.htm

With increasing numbers of immigrants, especially Russian, Austrian and Polish Jews, arriving in Britain, immigration had come to be seen as a serious political issue by 1901. Some politicians and publicists were quick to denounce it as a threat, and even as an 'alien invasion'............
............
............
..............The anti-immigration climate of the time, however, led to the setting up in 1902 of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, whose report resulted in the 1905 Aliens Act.

I am ashamed to say, my Great Grandfather (entered Britain late 19th century) sat on this Commiisssion*, to stop any more people like himself coming into the country.

The shame (I assume) was such that , during my lifetime at least, this has never been mentioned. My cousin found out, I don't know how, and told me about it.

* Interesting, after some searching, I found a list of members and recognised no names. However, I am not familiar with the names of that generation on my mother's side of the family. Or perhaps he wasn't a member but someone reporting to them. Or perhaps he testified before the Commission (can't find a list of names for that, and it seems more likely than actually being on the Committee). Or perhaps he cropped up during the 1905 shenanigans getting the Act through Parliament rather than the 1902 Commission. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/office-holders/vol10/pp42-57#h3-0008

[Aggie]

And we see that mostly, What's What is humans are still busy killing each other over the stupidest and most trifling of reasons:
  "Never rub the blue belly-button jelly clockwise you heretic!"

What this indicates to me is that humans need only the barest excuse to kill each other, else we'd acknowledge the obvious fact that there's no difference in going widdershins. Religion makes such a lovely vehicle for violence precisely because it invokes the highest authority. Very few other ideas make such a good banner to wrap our violence and power-mongering up in, save perhaps Patriotism. When they are combined, it's synergistic.

[Griffin NoName]

And we see that mostly, What's What is humans are still busy killing each other over the stupidest and most trifling of reasons:
  "Never rub the blue belly-button jelly clockwise you heretic!"

What this indicates to me is that humans need only the barest excuse to kill each other...

Men need..... Ok some women do but only a very few, not enough to generalise.

[Aggie]

Ayuh, but far too infrequently have women protested their men going off to war in a widespread and meaningful way. Surely, if half the population of the world was universally against human-human violence, we would have made some progress by now? Part of seeing men as brutal killing machines involves seeing them as disposable people, whose deaths matter less than women or children, no matter the circumstances.

I abhor violence against women, but in sheer numbers it's dwarfed by violence against men.  By men. Even cultures that are sane enough to take measures against the former readily glorify the latter.

(I don't disagree with you, but I'm getting off the "I Hate Men" bandwagon this year).

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Women are statistically more likely to have more empathy to others than men do, and as a confirmation for every woman psychopath there are four men psychopaths.
---
OTOH despite all the xenophobic attempts to the contrary over millennia, men have absolutely no problem mating with women of other races, countries or religions.

[The Meromorph]

OTOH despite all the xenophobic attempts to the contrary over millennia, men have absolutely no problem mating with women of other races, countries or religions.

Not to change the subject...
They do if they're old, fat and ugly men...

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Sorry, my bad, I should've been more specific: men have not problem in their intention to mate with women of other races....