Huge explosion in Oslo

[stickdog99]

i mean, really. It's one thing to say that perhaps there were some people involved in law enforcement who purposefully delayed action for some ulterior motive (for which there is still very scant evidence), but it's quite another to be questioning the people who actually were there and saved lives.

stickdog, would you say such offensive things to these peoples' faces?

Whose ass did the leader of the group save other than his own?

[Canadian_watcher]

Everyone is so fucking offended by everything. During the time scores of kids were getting killed, their ostensible leader absconded with the biggest boat around that could have been used to rescue scores drowning kids and drove it as fast and as far away as he possibly could without running out of lake. Doesn't that strike anyone here except me as a somewhat strange response to all of your friends being in mortal danger?

And, folks, the 20-year-old was NOT the pilot of the boat! He was just a crew member.

Leader. There's where you're going wrong. You've just said that he wasn't the leader or even the pilot.. just a crew member.
Do you remember being 20? Or maybe you're still waiting for that milestone. In either case it really has nothing to do with age. Maybe this 20 year old had a new baby at home. Maybe his mother was dying. Maybe he just got scared shitless. It's not worth freaking out over the fact that he wasn't your own personal ideal hero.

[justdrew]

i mean, really. It's one thing to say that perhaps there were some people involved in law enforcement who purposefully delayed action for some ulterior motive (for which there is still very scant evidence), but it's quite another to be questioning the people who actually were there and saved lives.

stickdog, would you say such offensive things to these peoples' faces?

Everyone is so fucking offended by everything. During the time scores of kids were getting killed, their ostensible leader absconded with the biggest boat around that could have been used to rescue scores drowning kids and drove it as fast and as far away as he possibly could without running out of lake. Doesn't that strike anyone here except me as a somewhat strange response to all of your friends being in mortal danger?

And, folks, the 20-year-old was NOT the pilot of the boat! He was just a crew member.

it does seem odd. but - they were told a story that more 'associates' of the fake cop were due soon. I can see them not wanting to be there, and not wanting them to have access to the ferry, and I suppose they might have assumed the police response would come in on a helicopter. or have some other access.

[stickdog99]

Everyone is so fucking offended by everything. During the time scores of kids were getting killed, their ostensible leader absconded with the biggest boat around that could have been used to rescue scores drowning kids and drove it as fast and as far away as he possibly could without running out of lake. Doesn't that strike anyone here except me as a somewhat strange response to all of your friends being in mortal danger?

And, folks, the 20-year-old was NOT the pilot of the boat! He was just a crew member.

Leader. There's where you're going wrong. You've just said that he wasn't the leader or even the pilot.. just a crew member.
Do you remember being 20? Or maybe you're still waiting for that milestone. In either case it really has nothing to do with age. Maybe this 20 year old had a new baby at home. Maybe his mother was dying. Maybe he just got scared shitless. It's not worth freaking out over the fact that he wasn't your own personal ideal hero.

Why not read the story before commenting on my take. There are four people we know who were on the ferry when it was driven as far away as possible:

1) the 20 year-old who got interviewed who made up the ferry's "crew"

2) the captain of the ferry

3) the leader of the labor youth group that organized the camping trip, and

4) the "advisor" of the leader of the labor youth group that organized the camping trip.

I'm guessing that number 4 was calling the shots, and I'm guessing that at least 10 more kids died because he moved the ferry off the grid.

[lupercal]

And, folks, the 20-year-old was NOT the pilot of the boat! He was just a crew member.

It sounds for all the world like he's getting set up to play Lord Jim. John, from your story:

"How was the decision to go made?"

John, wait a while before he responds and looks down.

"I think that in such situations are not talking about taking such a decision, it was the only way that we had to go. There were several who shouted that we had to go. There was no one around us at the dock and it had not helped us to be there," says John.

He says that he subsequently has thought a lot about the decision they took the afternoon.

"It's clear they know little of it that we were nine in the boat, and it could fit 50."

Lord Jim:

Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad originally published as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900.

An early and primary event is Jim's abandonment of a ship in distress on which he is serving as a mate. He is publicly censured for this action and the novel follows his later attempts at coming to terms with his past.

Plot summary

Jim (his surname is never disclosed), a young British seaman, becomes first mate on the Patna, a ship full of pilgrims travelling to Mecca for the hajj. Jim joins his captain and other crew members in abandoning the ship and its passengers. A few days later, they are picked up by a British ship. However, the Patna and its passengers are later also saved, and the reprehensible actions of the crew are exposed. The other participants evade the judicial court of inquiry, leaving Jim to the court alone. The court strips him of his navigation command certificate for his dereliction of duty. Jim is angry with himself, both for his moment of weakness, and for missing an opportunity to be a 'hero'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Jim

Weird, or maybe not.

[lupercal]

Know what else is weird? When it came to that ever-so-troublesome matter of cooking up a credible motivation, always the Achilles heel in these things, the spooks reached for none other than native son Henrik Ibsen and the character of (get this) Oswald from Ghosts, which was quite the scandal in the 1880s. From the Independent story VK posted:

None of these details provide an explanation for Breivik's decision to gun down 68 youth members of the Norwegian Labour party on Utoya island, convinced their support for multicultural values was encouraging "Muslim world domination".

However, his personal and sexual life may well provide criminal psychiatrists with evidence to explain his warped personality, his clinically obsessive character and even the motive for his acts. One clue is likely to be his ailing mother: she has not spoken or been interviewed since the massacre took place. But if the closing pages of Breivik's manifesto are credible then her ailment appears to stem from the final stages of an unspecified venereal disease which he claims she contracted several years ago and has since reduced her mental state "to that of a 10-year-old".

Mrs. Helene Alving, a widow.

Breivik appears never to have had a girlfriend worth mentioning. He was born in February 1979, the son of Jens Breivik, a career diplomat and Wenche Breivik, a nurse. Both were Norwegian Labour Party supporters. They divorced when Breivik was only one year old and he lived thereafter with his mother, who worked at Norway's embassies in Paris and London. He only maintained sporadic contact with his father and that came to an end when Breivik was 15.

Neighbours described Wenche as elderly and frail, but added that she was a gregarious and welcoming woman who often chatted to strangers and was fascinated by foreigners. She remarried a Norwegian army major. But although apparently regarding his stepfather as a "good bloke", Breivik appears to have secretly detested him for being a product of permissive Norwegian attitudes to sex. He blames his stepfather for having infected his mother with venereal disease which was also passed on to one of his half-sisters.

Oswald Alving, her son, a painter.

Ghosts:

Ghosts (original Norwegian title: Gengangere) is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was written in 1881 and first staged in 1882.[1]

Plot

Helen Alving is about to dedicate an orphanage she has built in the memory of her dead husband, Captain Alving. She reveals to her spiritual advisor, Pastor Manders, that she has hidden the evils of her marriage .... her husband's philandering continued until his death, and Mrs. Alving was unable to leave him prior for fear of being shunned by the community. During the action of the play she discovers that her son Oswald (whom she had sent away so that he would not be corrupted by his father) is suffering from inherited syphilis, and (worse) has fallen in love with Regina Engstrand, Mrs. Alving's maid, who is revealed to be an illegitimate daughter of Captain Alving, and thereby Oswald's own half-sister. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_(play)

They don't have penicillin yet in Norway?

[Burnt Hill]

I'm guessing that at least 10 more kids died because he moved the ferry off the grid

Heres another potential scenario.
The ferry crew wait for a full boat (calling people over?(the kids know the ferry is safe?)) and after awhile load up to the full 50.
Then along comes the shooter, massacres the whole lot, and thanks them for waiting up.
Seriously stickdog, you are not being very considerate.
Doubt they could of done much rescuing from the water either.
Besides being a giant target, the logistics appear quite difficult.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

There seem to be pictures taken by cellphones after all (of people barricading themselves), see this clip at 0:39
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obnD28INKdo

[Canadian_watcher]

Everyone is so fucking offended by everything. During the time scores of kids were getting killed, their ostensible leader absconded with the biggest boat around that could have been used to rescue scores drowning kids and drove it as fast and as far away as he possibly could without running out of lake. Doesn't that strike anyone here except me as a somewhat strange response to all of your friends being in mortal danger?

And, folks, the 20-year-old was NOT the pilot of the boat! He was just a crew member.

Leader. There's where you're going wrong. You've just said that he wasn't the leader or even the pilot.. just a crew member.
Do you remember being 20? Or maybe you're still waiting for that milestone. In either case it really has nothing to do with age. Maybe this 20 year old had a new baby at home. Maybe his mother was dying. Maybe he just got scared shitless. It's not worth freaking out over the fact that he wasn't your own personal ideal hero.

Why not read the story before commenting on my take. There are four people we know where on the ferry when it was driven as far away as possible:

1) the 20 year-old who got interviewed who was the ferry's "crew"

2) the captain of the ferry

3) the leader of the labor youth group that organized the camping trip, and

4) the "advisor" of the leader of the labor youth group that organized the camping trip.

I'm guessing that number 4 was calling the shots, and I'm guessing that at least 10 more kids died because he moved the ferry off the grid.

accept my apologies? I am in agreement with you that all of this deserves to be dissected and criticized and questioned. Full disclosure is that I worked for the government (not in Norway though) and I have exactly no faith in them. I honestly think that red tape and bureaucracy is as evil as sabotage... so from my perspective any one reason for the delay amounts to the same level of wrong as any other. I know I'll be in the minority on that. Surprise, surprise, I'm used to it.

[lupercal]

There seem to be pictures taken by cellphones after all (of people barricading themselves), see this clip at 0:39
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obnD28INKdo

Interesting. No cell pics of shooters yet though the pic at 1:46 is made to seem like one ("this picture may capture that very moment"), and I've seen it referred to elsewhere as a cell-phone pic, but in fact it's taken from the air, and is part of the helicopter footage.

hmm..

p.s. one more weird thing: Breivik's video is entirely in English, makes no reference to Norway, and includes exactly one reference to Breivik -- the dubious scuba-man shot -- and no actual speaking from anyone.

[Plutonia]

Plutonia, it is a strange interview with the taxi driver ("Travis Bickle"), the thing about little girls also stood out for me, also weird that apparently there are two taxidrivers, the one from the interview the day before and another one on the day itself driving him from one target to another, both in silver cars, although that is the most common color i suppose.

A couple of hits in the medias:

Breivik is one of the bad Travis Bickles:

Monday 25 July 2011

Don’t turn Norway into Europe’s 11 September

Sections of the European liberal elite are trying to make moral mileage out of this rampage just as shamelessly as the right did with 9/11.

>>snip<<

Breivik launched attacks, not against their alleged enemies (Western imperialists and Muslim crusaders respectively), but against the everyday inhabitants of their own societies. Theirs is a haughty violence of estranged rage, rather than anything to do with traditional political outlooks. Their tantrums have more in common with the outlook of Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, though on a far more terrifying scale, than they do with the politics of the past.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/ ... cle/10923/

And

Assange is the good Travis Bickle:

8 December, 2010
JOHN WIGHT: JULIAN ASSANGE: GOD’S LONELY MAN

>>snip<<

Martin Scorcese’s cinematic masterpiece, Taxi Driver (1976), starring Robert De Niro, takes on the same theme; though albeit from a slightly different perspective. By night the main character, Travis Bickle, trawls the cold and dangerous streets of New York in a taxicab, encountering pimps, prostitutes, junkies, thieves, the human detritus of society he describes in notes to himself as ‘the scum.’ By day, unable to sleep, he hangs out at porn cinemas and in his tiny apartment, where he gradually develops a fixation with guns and nurtures a rising sense of rage at a society he views as beyond redemption.

From the first scene to the last, Bickle is on an inevitable journey towards the violence which marks his end. This inevitability is eloquently described in the very first page of the script by the writer, Paul Schraeder, who ends the reader’s introduction to the character thus:

‘He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock sprig cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence.’

The isolation and alienation of the individual in society, then, is commonly portrayed in culture as manifesting in an unconscious rebellion against that society which in its most extreme form often results in a pathological act of random mass or individual murder. Digressing for a moment, is it any coincidence that such acts of random violence are most prevalent in a country, the United States, where the most extreme variant of capitalism anywhere in the world is the driving force of the economy?

But the alienation suffered by the individual does not always end in the negative outcome commonly portrayed in popular culture or literature. The case of Julian Assange reveals this to be the case.

>>snip<<

Assange, it seems clear, is a man driven by a messianic anger..

http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=7315

[StarmanSkye]

That whole taking-the-ferry-far-away sure seems rash and inexplicable. Why couldn't they have tarried offshore a ways, out of immediate gunfire danger to see if they could be of help in ongoing rescue, recovery or helping assist police transport who would be responding to the emergency? I know its a bit unfair doing Monday morning quarterbacking, esp in a circumstance fraught with terror, chaos and the imminent danger of potential fatal threat, but their action prevented scores from being rescued and significanctly impeded the police response. Being 1/2 mile offshore would have made their risk almost zero while keeping options open. The 'leader' and advisor showed remarkably flawed judgement. That bothers me.

[solace]

i mean, really. It's one thing to say that perhaps there were some people involved in law enforcement who purposefully delayed action for some ulterior motive (for which there is still very scant evidence), but it's quite another to be questioning the people who actually were there and saved lives.

stickdog, would you say such offensive things to these peoples' faces?

Everyone is so fucking offended by everything. During the time scores of kids were getting killed, their ostensible leader absconded with the biggest boat around that could have been used to rescue scores drowning kids and drove it as fast and as far away as he possibly could without running out of lake. Doesn't that strike anyone here except me as a somewhat strange response to all of your friends being in mortal danger?

And, folks, the 20-year-old was NOT the pilot of the boat! He was just a crew member.

You can't save the world of tomorrow if you are dead today. And new followers are always easy to come by.

[Plutonia]

There seem to be pictures taken by cellphones after all (of people barricading themselves), see this clip at 0:39
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obnD28INKdo

Here's a screenshot:

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

I'm trying to watch the manifesto video again but it's so badly made it's more like a caricature: the text is for the most part so small it's unreadable and the images are all cliched rightwing images. Also no voiceover or anything. In 9 years you'd think he could have made something better! But trying to move away from the details, thinking about what could someone want with a video like that, I do think of the united states unfortunately. I think that is the one party that especially right now is very afraid of a united europe at peace with islam and cooperating with Russia. Really the only party I can think of that has anything to gain by this horror.