Huge explosion in Oslo

[Burnt Hill]

I imagine that any of the teens that stopped to take pics and videos are amongst the dead.

[JackRiddler]

The first phone-related reports I heard were that kids had wisely switched their phones off while hiding so that incoming calls from concerned parents or friends wouldn't give their positions away to Breivik. Makes sense to me.

Ever heard of vibrate mode?

Not only have I heard OF vibrate mode, I've also HEARD it, sometimes many times an hour, every day. I'm sure Breivik can hear it, too.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

Obviously you can put both sound and vibrate off on phones, you get a text message when youre being called. The teens texting and updating facebook thankfully didnt all end up dead. So I can imagine someone took some pics also, not neccesarily of the killer but maybe of safe places to hide etc, to convince people that it's not a joke, to identify the killer. So I could also see a purpose to it. But why discuss this further for now.. Strange that the video of Port Arthur figured so prominently in the news Ketona, that footage has been online like forever so why start making a fuss about it now claiming it was uploaded three days ago... weird. Maybe to reinstall the idea that wanting to see actual footage is just plain wrong.

[Stephen Morgan]

Christ, you know it ain't easy.

Don't you know how hard it can be?

[Stephen Morgan]

He writes under the penname “Lionheart,” named after King Richard I, who earned the name Lionheart for commanding armies as a teenager during the Third Crusade.

Stopping for a moment to grok 'commanding armies as a teenager'.

Pretty standard. I was just today reading about Fulford Gate, where obviously the two commanding Saxon Earls were both teenagers.

[MacCruiskeen]

I agree, Mr. 8-bit. The difference being that this time it is a right-winger who did the deed rather than the islamo patsy-jackers, so the right-wing is gathering their disclaimers and equivocations around the event and infusing the dialogue with a predictable set of conspiracy tropes which implicate the Norwegian social-democratic left. Here's where this leads:

NORWAY massacre: there were no "victims". All staged. All camp members part of the theater

The functional equivalent of the "no-planers" transposed to meet the needs of this incident. And ten years from now when this subject comes up, there will be those who will still be adamantly discussing controlled demolition helicopters. It's as if the extreme right has been taking notes from the extreme truthers.

barracuda, i've had five minutes to cool down and ponder my response to this, and here it is, with all due respect:

For that 'helicopter' jibe -- directed very obviously at me, although you were cautious enough not to actually mention my name -- you can just fuck off.

Don't dare associate me with no-planers, don't dare insinuate that I'm like some buffoon who denies there was ever a massacre on that island, and don't dare try to compensate for your own piqued vanity because I (just like the fucking Norwegian populace) ventured to question the Norwegian police's grotesque excuses for their grotesque delay, and then spent time locating and posting some easily discoverable information that implicates them even further, while you have done nothing but apologise for them incessantly with a vain and smarmy pretence at expertise, inside knowledge, and superior powers of a priori reasoning you demonstrably do not have.

HTH.

[stickdog99]

The first phone-related reports I heard were that kids had wisely switched their phones off while hiding so that incoming calls from concerned parents or friends wouldn't give their positions away to Breivik. Makes sense to me.

Ever heard of vibrate mode?

Not only have I heard OF vibrate mode, I've also HEARD it, sometimes many times an hour, every day. I'm sure Breivik can hear it, too.

Not sure what your phone model is, but my phone's vibrate mode is completely inaudible when the phone is in my pocket.

[stickdog99]

Sorry, I appear to have over-estimated your intelligence and under-estimated your attachment to John Wayne movies.

Because only John Wayne would dare try to stop kids from getting shot by the dozen.

[stickdog99]

Christ, you know it ain't easy.

Don't you know how hard it can be?

The way things are going ...

[barracuda]

For that 'helicopter' jibe -- directed very obviously at me, although you were cautious enough not to actually mention my name -- you can just fuck off.

Okay, this is why we need more moderators, for those who might have wondered.

Don't dare associate me with no-planers, don't dare insinuate that I'm like some buffoon who denies there was ever a massacre on that island, and don't dare try to compensate for your own piqued vanity because I (just like the fucking Norwegian populace) ventured to question the Norwegian police's grotesque excuses for their grotesque delay, and then spent time locating and posting some easily discoverable information that implicates them even further, while you have done nothing but apologise for them incessantly with a vain and smarmy pretence at expertise, inside knowledge, and superior powers of a priori reasoning you demonstrably do not have.

You're arguments do not really hold water, no matter how many times you repeat them, and no increases in font size or petty name calling and insults will change that, I'm afraid. Neither do they improve considerably by dragging them to a new thread as if they had not already been examined, as if arguiing your ideas to exhaustion somehow improves their worth. It does not. But it s an all-too familiar tactic here - debate by attrition.

This board is still hotly debating the chimera of controlled demolition ten years after 911, and the helicopter issue is, barring some astounding new evidence, analogous in it's indeterminacy with regard to demonstrating some aspect of conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories have been rampant all over the web regarding this story, ever since it turned out the killer was a conservative and a christian. Those theories will quickly codify and point the finger of blame upon the social democratic government of Norway, i.e. the left. It's not a shocking discovery. That it's happening has been obvious since Pam Gellar started uploading facebook screencaps, the new explosive squib.

So address the body of my post, rather than simply pointing your impotent cries of fuck you and "cop apologist" which I've now heard for some forty pages of this thread, voiced with faux earnestness as if that was an actual argument. It isn't. It's simply gutteral insults. Such tactics just make your polemic look even more strained and stretched than it actually is.

[MacCruiskeen]

barracuda, you had a deliberate, sly and nasty dig at me and you don't have the guts or the grace to apologise for it or even to admit it. In defending myself as I did, I was merely replying in kind, because your piqued vanity clearly matters more to you than any kind of honest debate, even about a topic as horrific and as complicated as this one. And if this thread is deeply unworthy of its topic, and by god it is, then you bear a huge part of the responsibility for that. You are why I started a new thread about one single aspect of this disaster (police response time to the massacre, police excuses), then you entered that too, pontificating vapidly yet again about Norway's allegedly hobbit-level emergency response capabilities, and going in a huff when I demonstrated yet again that you were talking pure rubbish. You had no honest or convincing response to the demonstrable fact that Norway is well equipped with emergency-response helicopters, no reponse except pique. So you shuffled over here and had a surreptitious and nasty dig at me in this foul thread instead.

Most sophisticated of you, very far from vulgar.

Carry on, though. Have fun here.

[barracuda]

Fuck you, you smarmy, dishonest, patronising, timewasting creep.

You had a sly and nasty dig at me and you don't have the guts or the grace to apologise for it or even to admit it. I am merely replying in kind. And if this thread is deeply unworthy of its topic, and by god it is, then you bear a huge part of the responsibility for that. You are why we need, not more moderators, but new ones.

Fuck you.

I fully admit it was addressed to you and stickdog and lupercal and some others here. No apologies, though. But tell me to fuck off again and I'll suspend your account.

[Elihu]

come on kids. don't let the terr-err-ists win...

[Elihu]

sorry, that should have been 'teear-er-or-iss-ts-ts-ts" . bastards. they take the battle everywhere, even linguistics...

[MacCruiskeen]

I fully admit it was addressed to you and stickdog and lupercal and some others here. No apologies, though. But tell me to fuck off again and I'll suspend your account.

Spoken like a true boss, moderator. I touch my forelock in awed acquiescence.