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NORWAY.

joeyjoey
edited July 2011
A precious friend went back home and this morning we woke up to some scary news from Oslo.
I wrote to her but I have yet to hear back.
It looks pretty wild.

Comments

  • joeyjoey
    I heard from Ingebling that she was heading out of town when it happened.
    She heard the bang but didn't know what it was until later.
    She is safe and out of town.
  • UncleBoatShoes2011UncleBoatShoes2011
    I thought this thought as well.
    I love Ingeborg!

    NORWAY! Why Norway!?

  • MarcusMarcus
    Home of the Peace Prize? Is it Gaddafi? I hear only 7 are confirmed dead, even though a huge building was mostly taken out. Hope it's not many more than that.

    ☮☮☮
  • lml__0_0__lmllml__0_0__lml
    good vibes to friends and families and norwegians
    this kind of stuff always sucks
  • DeathDeath
    Ugh
    I wish this kind of stuff would quit happening already.
  • joeyjoey
    The latest news update from the BBC says at least 80 people were killed in the Utoeya shooting alone. The suspect in custody is a thirty-two year old Norwegian man.
  • joeyjoey
    I was blasting Burzum when I heard the news. Maybe I should listen to something less aggressive.
  • MatthewMatthew
    At least 80 dead, so awful.
  • MirandaJulyMirandaJuly
    That's honestly probably more people than have been murdered in the past decade there... :(
  • the_owlsthe_owls
    This is sickening.
  • joeyjoey
    This is huge. It would be a big deal anywhere, but even more in a country with such a low murder rate. It's so surreal sounding. People running away from the shooter into the woods and jumping into water to swim. So terrifying.
    It's a weird world we live in.
    It's weird that this is even a possibility.
  • YoursTrulyYoursTruly
    FUCKING GUNS
  • LelandLeland
    NPR mentioned that there is no capital punishment in Norway. They also said something about the penalty of murder being, I think they said, 21 years. That's so different than here.

    The killer is alive and apparently happy to talk about the reasons for his crime. Parallels to Timothy McVeigh seem to fit his motivations.

    Can I tell you something though? I'm having a hard time seeing this despicable act as a greater evil than our government's wars and the worldwide effort to protect billionaire's financial bubble winnings while cutting support for public health and education.

    Evil is evil. Funding war instead of health is mass murder.

    Deep compassion for the friends and families of Norway. Peace.

  • joeyjoey
    edited July 2011
    I agree with you DrJ about not really finding this despicable act a greater evil than the other shit happening in the world.
    It's true.
    But I also don't really believe these fuck-ups who go on shooting people and their desire to be evil in the first place. I think there is a spark of insanity strong enough to make them execute their plan, but they always seem to try really hard to convince themselves of something pretty stupid and illogical afterwards.
    Governments fund wars over health care and education, billionaires are endlessly protected but these "small" events are a sad reminder that a single individual can easily suck up all the headlines and attention and put a permanent stain on the lives of so many people by committing the sort of atrocity that basically requires shooting into a crowd with a gun. This event happens to have taken place on a substantially larger scale, but I bet that with fewer victims he would have achieved the exact same recognition.
    These shootings stay in the memory of nations because the victims are average people who have little power. Civilians. Normal loved ones. And the villain can be named and he knows he'll be remembered.
  • YoursTrulyYoursTruly
    Imagine what life would be like if some mystical force took away every gun on the earth and made it impossible to make new ones.

    Yeah, we like a villain we can name. It's so much easier to hate bin Laden than it is to hate "the military-industrial complex." Even though the latter has killed exponentially more people than the former, and for stupider, more evil reasons, arguably (MONEY vs. IDEOLOGY, which is stupider?).

    Or maybe it's like...we are weirdly comfortable with the idea that governments don't mind slaughtering thousands of civilians, because that's always been the case with governments and that's just life, but the idea of "one of us" doing it is deeply disturbing. We accept the system that controls us and propagates mass murder/war as simply inevitable, but if a single individual does something similar it becomes inconceivable and horrific.
  • MatthewMatthew
    http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/the-washington-post-owes-the-world-an-apology-for-this-item/242400/
  • YoursTrulyYoursTruly
    well, that's not all that shitty rag has to apologize for, but that's pretty brutal.

    What a fucking piece of shit newspaper. I've said it before and I'll say it again many times before I pass. Makes the half-assed NYT look like the fucking Tanakh
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